The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! With its scientific character, anthroposophy is not doing well with our contemporaries. The scientists find that this anthroposophy does not have the character of what they call science; and in turn, the people of faith, those who, from a religious point of view, advocate a way for people to find paths to the spiritual world, criticize precisely this scientific character of anthroposophy. Scientists are accustomed to taking what is accessible to sense observation , what can be investigated by experiment, to take it in, to combine it rationally, and then to ascend to certain laws that underlie the natural phenomena that are perceptible to the senses.

Anyone who has familiarized themselves with the investigations in this field with the kind of scientific conscientiousness and serious inner discipline that underlie our newer science has often absorbed the opinion that exact, real, scientific only possible when it relies on external sense perception and on what the intellect can fathom with the judgments it makes about sense perception and with the conclusions it draws from them. This kind of research has a certain certainty, I would even say a certain ground in that which cannot be denied in its existence, because it proves itself in this existence independently of the human being and announces itself to him out of this existence. One may, as is the case with many physiologically or even psychologically minded personalities of modern times, believe that what the senses directly perceive, what is the content of human perception, is conditioned by the peculiarity of the senses, and thus has a certain subjective character. But they are certain that even if what is perceived directly has a subjective character, for external observation there still underlies something objective for the human being, which presents itself to this observation and provides a firm foundation for research. Therefore, such personalities, who are, as it were, schooled in the exact investigation of external natural phenomena, feel insecure at the moment when this field of external sensory phenomena is left behind and they ascend to other fields. They believe that the inner certainty that is guaranteed by observation and experiment and by the mind that is bound to them, ceases the moment one leaves the soil of this sensory world. This is the source of such judgments as that made by du Bois-Reymond in his classic speech “On the Limits of Knowledge of Nature”, that science ends where the supersensible begins. Anyone approaching anthroposophy with this attitude will naturally have to deny its scientific character, and basically it is only this psychological background that rebels in the widest circles today when the scientific character of anthroposophy is mentioned.

On the other hand, there are people of faith. They often do not dispute that Anthroposophy presents what it has to say about the supersensible worlds in the form of ideas and concepts, and also in the form of connections between ideas and concepts that are thoroughly scientific in character, or at least endeavor to emulate the scientific character. But they dispute Anthroposophy's legitimacy precisely because it strives for this scientific character. For they say: Whatever can reveal itself to man from the supersensible worlds must reveal itself to him in the most intimate experiences of his soul; man must, above all things, tend towards what he feels from the supersensible with feeling and inclination of will, and this supersensible must bear a certain mysterious character. It is precisely when one stands before the mystery with one's soul fervently and religiously attuned, before that which does not yield to the transparent idea, to the clear concept, that one can develop within oneself that elevation, that selfless devotion, which is necessary for the human being in relation to the supersensible world.

And so it is that precisely such personalities are of the opinion that anthroposophy, because it wants to bring the supersensible into the comprehensible element of human consciousness, thereby distorts the religious feeling of the human being, their pious devotion. What relates to the religious must – so it is said – bear an irrational character. One even says that religion must have a kind of paradoxical character, that it must not be confined to what is scientifically called the comprehensible.

Anthroposophy is now confronted with these two views. It is quite understandable that, compared to the usual schools of thought of our time, all of which can be more or less categorized into one of the two categories described, the scientific character of anthroposophy is incomprehensible and difficult to understand. For anthroposophy seeks to arrive at the supersensible in a scientific way, by paths other than those usually recognized in science, and it seeks to follow this path into the supersensible with courage — until the goal is reached where this supersensible subtle world yields to human ideas in exactly the same way as external nature yields to human ideas for natural science, and it becomes difficult for anthroposophy to justify its scientific character in the face of the often rigid tendency of the spiritual currents of our time. Now, in order to characterize this scientific character in today's debate from certain points of view, it will be necessary to address the methodology of anthroposophy from a certain point of view.

This anthroposophy feels most at home at its starting point when it can fully stand where our time of scientific thinking and scientific research has led. Dilettantism and laymanship in relation to natural science may perhaps be touched on enthusiastically by anthroposophy; but they will not be able to find the deepest inner satisfaction in it, because anthroposophy will seem to them to work far too much in the sense of scientific thinking. But it must be said that anthroposophy begins where today's recognized science ends. Today's recognized science starts from the externally given, rises from this given to the ideas called natural laws of this given. If we then live within these ideas, so to speak connecting the ideas we have gained from nature with our soul life, then we have an inner view of nature, and this inner view satisfies us because we can clearly survey the transition from one idea to another, because inwardly, so to speak, in the whole field of our natural ideas, we have clearly before us what presents itself to us externally in the details of sensory observation and experiment. And when this natural science has arrived at this experience of natural ideas, then it feels at its end. Anthroposophy, however, seeks to begin precisely at this point. It takes up what has entered into the soul as natural ideas, and looks at the state of mind of the person who has united such natural ideas with his soul. It looks at the way in which the human being has applied his own activity, has brought his soul and spirit into action while exploring nature, how he has arrived at his ideas of nature; it looks at the activity that the human being has carried out during the research, and it then seeks to develop this activity further. In a sense, it seeks to make the beginning with an inner soul development, using what natural science has arrived at as its end. This now seems to lead entirely into the subjective.

Yes, by further developing the ideas gained, by seeking an inner soul life as a continuation of what has been applied in relation to external nature, one believes that one can get into the purely subjective, into the purely personal, for which only assertions of a subjective character may be made.

Now, dear readers, for the first steps in this direction, this is undoubtedly the case. But anyone who follows the details of these inner soul exercises for the further development of human soul abilities in my writings “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science: An Outline”, and so on, will find that this subjective approach is only a transitional stage and that in the end, beyond the subjective, one arrives at an objective, an objective that is indeed inwardly experienced subjectively – like the ideas of nature – but which, in its certainty, in its validity, is as independent of human subjectivity subjectivity, as are, after all, the mathematico-geometric judgments that are worked out subjectively, albeit only formally. These judgments, however, are independent of human subjectivity in their truth character, despite being worked out subjectively. Only through the path taken by anthroposophical research does one not enter into a merely formal realm, as in mathematics, but into a realm in which human spiritual content is created that relates to realities. When we draw a triangle in mathematics and examine its laws, it is initially only an inward subjective experience, and we must then apply it outwardly to something that can be perceived by the senses so that we can speak of objectivity. The anthroposophical method leads to certain insights, just as in mathematics, but at the same time they lead to insights that have their meaning and validity in the truly spiritually existing world. This becomes clear when one describes – from a certain point of view, I can do this today – the methods that the anthroposophical researcher applies to his or her own inner soul life in order to enter the supersensible world. I say: from a certain point of view, I can undertake this, because this anthroposophical path of research is a very complicated one, it has to involve many details of inner soul practice, and with regard to these details, I must refer you to the books mentioned.

But now, with regard to today's topic, which is supposed to deal with the scientific character of anthroposophy, I would like to start from a kind of historical perspective, because from this the scientific character of what is currently trying to incorporate anthroposophy into human civilization will perhaps be most apparent. When we speak today of the methods by which anthroposophy seeks to penetrate the supersensible worlds, many of our contemporaries are reminded of methods that are similar to them, or which they perhaps even consider to be the same as anthroposophy.

Just in the last few weeks, I have had to talk about anthroposophical methods in a wide variety of cities, and again and again I heard the judgment: Europe is not suitable for pointing people to the ancient Asian yoga cult, to the ancient yoga system, where one is to prepare the soul through inner soul exercises in order to see something other than what it is able to see without these exercises in ordinary life and in ordinary science. But people who judge in this way do not realize that there is a radical difference between what I describe as the anthroposophical methods and what was present — albeit going back to a distant gray antiquity — in oriental wisdom schools and oriental spiritual currents as soul exercises for arriving at another world in the manner of those spiritual currents, other than the one ordinary life presents. If we point out what these schools of thought wanted to give to man, we immediately notice that the ancient spiritual and soul character of man in the East was quite different from that of present-day Europeans.

If we are unprejudiced, we must take seriously the idea that we are seeking a progression in human development from one metamorphosis of the soul life to another. Anyone who believes that the human soul was essentially the same in all cultural periods, or at most different in certain primitive, wild tribes, is making a huge mistake. Anyone who is able to immerse themselves in the way in which, for example, the ancient Vedas or other ancient documents of earlier times sought to convey wisdom to the world will find that this way of imparting wisdom relied on a very different receptivity in the human being, in a very different state of mind, and perhaps only anthroposophical research is in a position to provide information about how the human being has changed in this respect in the course of his development. If we immerse ourselves in the ideas that have taken on poetic forms in the Vedas, for example, we find that there is an enormous difference between the way in which the Vedas were absorbed into the soul life and the way in which we feel today that they are appropriate to our soul state. We feel the need today to have strictly defined, sharply contoured ideas, ideas that have a recognizably logical character, that are transparent, that appeal not directly to the feelings but only indirectly. These are only isolated character traits that I can give. But anyone who compares the wisdom handed down to mankind in the Vedas, for example, with what we today call our pursuit of science and wisdom, will find a huge difference. What is the reason for this difference?

Now, what is usually called psychology today is not very capable of entering into the inner workings of the human soul, which is so mobile and carries so many individual, characteristic, essential traits. That is why today we find little that actually resembles the wisdom handed down to us in the Vedas. But some clarity can be gained if we do not compare the content of the Vedas with our sharply contoured, intellectualized concepts, but rather if we consider the following fact.

We imagine a human soul that is in the process of transitioning from a state of sleep to a state of wakefulness. We imagine it is imbued with the content of a dream. This dream content can take on wondrous and beautiful forms, can reveal an inner drama, can have a pictorial character that carries a thoroughly poetic mood. Certainly, this dream content cannot be directly compared with the wonderful wisdom of the Vedas. But there is something to it when Plato senses the poetic reliving of the world's secrets by the human soul as something dream-like. If we follow the soul as it emerges from the state of sleep and has these dream images before it during the transition to the waking state, we follow its path further: the dream images gradually paralyze, the person takes possession of his physical nature, especially of his will nature; because only when he has taken possession of his full will nature does everything dream-like disappear. Then he is able to make use of his senses through his corporeality; then he is aware of his connection with the physical world around him, then he is able to grasp the difference between the world of dreams and the world of reality.

What, then, is actually the essential thing in this transition from the state of sleep to the waking state? We can observe how, as it were, the dream fades more and more as the daytime perceptions emerge; the daytime perceptions dispel the dreamlike. But no one can be in any doubt that it is a real experience of the soul to which we surrender in our dreams, and that that part of us which later takes possession of our physical body lives in these dream images. The dream images escape it by submerging into physicality. With a more refined psychology than is available to our contemporaries, one can follow what I am hinting at here in great detail. Then one will find out how the soul actually emerges from a state that we will leave undefined for the time being, through the dream state, how it is in a state in the dream state of not quite having its body. At the same moment that it has its body, it is no longer dreaming. When anthroposophical research is applied to these facts, the following emerges. Anthroposophical research, as it must be understood today and as it takes account of contemporary civilization, initially aims to develop the human thought life so that thoughts become stronger and more intense than they are in ordinary science and ordinary life. This strengthening of thoughts is achieved through meditation and concentration. One devotes oneself to a particular content of thought, applying all the strength of the soul to it. In this way, the soul strengthens itself in the same way that a muscle strengthens itself when it is used in work. The whole mental life changes. One gradually feels that one no longer lives in abstract, pale thoughts, which can only be stimulated by the external world, but that one lives in thoughts themselves, as in an element that is as lively as otherwise only the experience of the external sense world; and by developing the power of thought further and further, one finally becomes free from one's physical organization in one's thinking. One develops an inner soul activity that, to a certain extent, takes place outside the body. Only now do you begin to realize what it means to have an inner soul activity. At first, through these exercises, they take place in mere thinking. But thinking is independent of all corporeality; one can bring it to such thinking independent of all corporeality. But then, when one has brought it to such inner vividness in thinking, one can distinguish between what occurs in waking life and what is present for the person from falling asleep to waking up in the state of sleep. For now we know through direct observation that when a person is awake and thinking, he must make use of the body for the activity of his thinking. For waking, ordinary thinking, the body is the foundation. The thinking that is peculiar to us in ordinary consciousness cannot, so to speak, illuminate itself to such an extent that it becomes truly conscious through its own power; the body must be its helper. Thought must be thought in the body, so that the thinking that we use in science and in our ordinary lives today is simply thinking with the help of the body. In this respect, anthroposophical research in particular makes people more materialistic than they would otherwise be with regard to ordinary thinking.

But you also learn to recognize something else, namely, the inner state of mind in which you are when you devote yourself to body-free thinking, which has arisen through meditation and concentration, when you have a thinking experience in the soul freed from the body, and you can now compare what you experience with what the state of sleep is like. One now learns to recognize that, with regard to one's body, one is just as independent during the strengthened independent life of thought as one is otherwise independent in sleep; only in sleep, in the independent soul that has left the body, the weakest prevails, which can only with the help of the body inwardly enlighten itself in such a way that it comes to consciousness. Therefore, thinking remains unconscious during sleep; we descend into unconsciousness during sleep. We enter into a very similar state of freedom from the body after meditation and concentration. But now the thinking has become so strong that unconsciousness does not occur, but rather a fullness of consciousness, so that one lives in a state that is radically different from the state of sleep, namely in a soul life independent of the body. Now one gets to know the character of human sleep. One now knows that the human soul leaves the body when it falls asleep, but that in the present state of human development it has only those thoughts that can be inwardly illuminated with the help of the body to the point of awareness; and by has consciously risen to such a state of soul, which is free of the body and is filled with content, one now learns to compare this state with that in which the authors of the Vedas were.

These authors of the Vedas could not make use of the kind of thinking that we have in our present-day civilization, and we are led back to a state of mind from older stages of human development, when man simply did not feel it to be his natural state to convey the secrets of the world through the body in sharply contoured thoughts, but where he could, through a certain instinct, externalize his thoughts, even if they could unfold outside the body. We look back to conditions, not as we have them today, but to dreamlike, dull, but still to conditions in which people developed the most important thing they developed in their soul life, namely the view of the world, outside of their body. One gets a picture of how the development of humanity in relation to the state of the soul was from older times to the present day. It can be said that the last remnants of an earlier state were still present until the middle of the Middle Ages, even until the dawn of modern times. It was only in the age of Galileo and Copernicus, which taught people to see the world in sharp, mathematically modeled terms, that this age progressed to an experience of the soul in thinking through the body ; whereas up to this age one still notices how the last remnants of a soul state free of the body are present in a form of knowledge free of the body, and the further back one goes in older times, the more one finds such knowledge free of the body. This could only express itself in soul formations similar to dreams. In a sense, people passed from the body-free state to the state where they use the body and develop what corresponds to their insight into the spiritual world.

We have to look back to such times if we want to understand what is communicated to us in older literature about the wisdom of the world. We must not criticize this wisdom of the world directly with our conceptual worlds; then we destroy it and cannot recognize it in its truth. But if we can transport ourselves back to these older times, and to that through which these older people wanted to go beyond their ordinary perception, then much will become understandable to us. For these people, it was not our science that was everyday, but rather what they saw in their images, in their instinctive imaginations. They did not need to achieve this through special exercises first. For them, the task of further development had to consist of something different than for us. If we now let ourselves in for this realization with what has been handed down to us, and especially look at the yoga exercises of the Orient, we must say: All these yoga exercises aimed at achieving a way of knowing that goes beyond the body in a body-free state, a way of knowing that uses the body as a tool.

This may sound strange, and yet, to an unbiased observer, it is how it presents itself! The goal of the older humanity was precisely to achieve something that is given to us in everyday life. They did not have the sharply contoured thinking that we apply with such triumph in science; they sought to achieve it through their exercises. Yes, even if you engage in the systematically well-performed yoga breathing exercises, where the personalities devoted to them do not perform the breathing process in the usual way, but in an abnormal but still lawful way, we see that they were designed to enable you to grasp the human body with what you were in a body-free state of mind. One might say: What is given to us as a gift is what these people strove for through their yoga exercises; we see everywhere how they endeavor to think in such a way that the body becomes the tool of thought. Thus, for anyone who fully understands the facts, the ancient yoga exercises that have been preserved to this day have the effect of making them see: These people strove for the state of mind that is, so to speak, partly innate and partly acquired through our upbringing since childhood.

Now, of course, the question may arise: But such a student of yoga has, through his yoga exercises, explored the secrets of the world for his own perception, has settled into wonderful worlds; but when one hears what they describe as the revelations they have heard, one soon gets the idea: what they have experienced is indeed very different from what we can strive for today with our abstract, blown-off thoughts. But here is an important psychological fact that must be considered. What can offer man the highest in a certain relationship in his relationship to the world arises precisely from practice, from striving, from inner work, not from the finished state. The yoga students had to conquer themselves with inner soul conquests to see what is given to us as a finished product, and only during this struggle and through this struggle do we become attuned to the deeper secrets of the world. If what is achieved is innate or acquired, it is taken for granted and presented as the self-evident in the environment; one no longer lives into the secrets of the world, one simply sees through the world according to one's organization in the environment. Therefore, for us, who are on the horizon that the yoga students first had to reach, the contemplation of the deeper secrets of the world, which the yoga students contemplated, has ceased. And today we feel the necessity to continue the practice, to continue it at a different level, to take the starting point where the yoga students left off.

The beginning of the yoga training is dreamlike, instinctively pictorial; but it is precisely to what we today feel is the actual spirit of science that the yoga student sought to develop. Today, because the spirit of science is now the natural state of civilization, we have to start from this state in our soul constitution and develop it further. We can therefore say: the yoga student has developed to our way of thinking, we have to develop further from our way of thinking. The yoga student designed all his exercises to incorporate thinking into his soul activity. Today, when I describe exercises to be practiced for the purpose of attaining higher knowledge, I do say that these exercises must be directed towards strengthening the thinking, elevating it – not just to unconscious imagination, which belongs to antiquity, but to conscious freedom from the body. We must become free from physicality again, whereas the yoga student strove to enter into it; so in a sense we are going in the opposite direction.

But then I must describe this path further, how these exercises must strive to develop a liveliness of soul such as we otherwise have in the experience of external sense perceptions. In our sensory perceptions, we are to a certain extent independent of our physicality. The senses are integrated into our physicality. However, we become relatively independent of our sensory perceptions; it is only in our thinking that we fully take in what is revealed to us from the outside world. Only when we develop further from this thinking, which the yoga student first strove for, does it now become important to suppress this thinking itself at a certain stage and to bring about a state that is similar to sensory perception, which does not merge into thought, but which, so to speak, leaves thought behind in the physical body. The essence of our exercises undertaken for the purpose of anthroposophical research is this: to overcome thinking in turn, to rise to a state that gives the person an experience, so to speak, in a second personality, but in such a way that this second personality now has the intense, the strengthened, the pictorialized thinking, and that the ordinary personality with common sense, with healthy thinking bound to the physical body, remains behind, fully aware.

Thus anyone who, in today's world, seeks to gain direct experience of supersensible knowledge must strive to achieve this twofold division of their personality. Anthroposophy is not to be confused with any kind of pathological condition. In hallucinations and visions, the personality is lost in the hallucinations and in the world of visions; in anthroposophical research, the personality remains and the ordinary, body-bound thinking continues to live. Those personalities who enter the higher worlds live in them with their developed, metamorphosed thinking. Thus the anthroposophical researcher is always in a position to follow up with his ordinary personality what he sees in the higher worlds, and to do so in a strictly critical way.

This training is now an absolute prerequisite for the anthroposophical path of research; and what is in the human personality by virtue of this training, the scientific character of the state of mind, is by no means abandoned. This scientific personality stands there, criticizes, controls - and even narrates - from its scientific concepts that which the other aspect of the personality, the one that has entered the supersensible world, beholds. But then we must say: on the one hand there is the outer sense perception; natural science turns to it, it seeks the laws of nature, it seeks to relive inwardly in the natural ideas, which have the laws of nature as their content, that which appears outwardly to the senses. The anthroposophical researcher finds himself in the state of soul that arises from this. By forming the ideas of nature in nature, we are scientifically satisfied by the character that this world of ideas bears. This scientific conviction is an inner experience! It is not the external world, nature, that tells us what is scientific, but our own methodology. When we give these ideas a content from sense perception with our ordinary thinking, we give them a supersensible content with the higher gaze of our strengthened thinking. There is no other content of thought, no other logic, no other scientific method that prevails in ordinary natural science and that prevails in what is seen supersensibly by the anthroposophical researcher and handed over to the scientific soul disposition for description.

That is the inner connection. The Yoga Training has sought the spirit of science as its ultimate goal. We have trained it in the age of Galileo and Copernicus in the outer world of nature, we are leading it further to conscious inner vision, but we do not deny it. We examine what is seen in the higher sense in the supersensible world, exactly in the same way, through the same ideas, as we examine what can be fathomed through the eyes, ears and other senses in outer experiment. In its development, humanity has striven for science. What science has become has become a human state of soul. This state of soul is cultivated by working one's way up into the supersensible world through anthroposophy.

But developing thoughts is only one part of what is striven for in anthroposophical schooling. In the previous lecture on “The Harmonization of Science, Art and Religion”, I already indicated that by strengthening our thoughts through meditation and concentration, we come to an intuitive perception of the soul and spirit of the human being as it was in a spiritual and soul world before birth or conception. One can rise to the eternal part of the human soul in its prenatal existence by developing the thoughts that are present in ordinary science. But if anthroposophical research is to be complete, exercises of the will must be added to this development of thought. Again, I cannot describe in detail what must be undertaken as exercises of the will for the purpose of anthroposophical research; I must refer to the books already mentioned, but I can again say something in principle.

To train the will, it is above all necessary that we raise the will, insofar as it extends into thinking, to a higher level than it is in ordinary life. A good exercise for this is what I call “reverse imagining”, for example when we look back on our daily life in the evening, preferably in images, so that a different force has to be developed than is contained in the thoughts. When we review our daily life backwards in such a way, allowing it to pass before our mind's eye in great detail, for example when we go down a staircase, we would imagine it in such a way that we start from the bottom step and work our way up to the top; not lose one's whole day to it, but it can be done in a short time if it is practiced correctly; if we get used to thinking about the course of ordinary events, then we have to exert the will to imagine events differently than they usually happen. We can also feel a melody backwards in this way or imagine a drama backwards. In doing so, we develop the will to a greater strength than is usual. We can now help ourselves in such exercises by doing other will exercises. In ordinary life, we proceed – if we consider longer periods of time, we can point out – from metamorphosis to metamorphosis; but it is the circumstances to which we surrender and which then make others out of us. But if you take your own development into your own hands, for example, if you try to break bad habits, if you try to unlearn something that may take years, and make this striving a characteristic of your nature by by taking it up into the will, one tries to take his development into his own hands according to a strictly outlined goal. The will is thereby strengthened, and one attains something in relation to supersensible seeing in a different direction than in the direction of thought. I want to express that through a comparison.

Take the human eye. Because it is transparent and does not bring its own materiality into play, we are able to see through the eye. The moment it brings its own materiality into play through a disease of the eyes, we can no longer see. The eye must be selflessly integrated into the human organism if it is to serve the purpose of seeing. Now I do not want to claim that the human organism is diseased in ordinary life; but for supersensible vision it is just as unsuitable as a strong-sighted eye is for ordinary vision. Through the exercises of the will our organism becomes, as it were, spiritually transparent. Normally the body is spiritually opaque; we carry it with us, we live with our will in its materiality. Through the exercises of the will, it becomes transparent in soul and spirit; it becomes, as it were, a sense organ. Through it, we learn to see spiritually and soulfully, as we see physically through the transparent eye. When we look through our body that has become transparent, we stand – as if through our physical, sensory eye in a physical outer world – in a spiritual world. We have progressed from imagination to inspiration and to the actual experience of being in a spiritual and soul world. We learn to be in the spiritual and soul world with our soul in the same way as we are in the physical world with our organization.

It turns out that we now experience something in the image that we would otherwise experience in death: in death, the body is shed, while the soul and spirit live on. That this is a truth is expressed in the image for this body-free will, that is, for the standing within the spiritual world, in the same way that what applies to our sensory environment is expressed only through a thought. We thus arrive at the other side of human immortality; we add to being unborn, being immortal. The anthroposophical researcher thus ascends to a real vision of immortality.

But when one comes to this vision, one also learns to evaluate other soul states of ordinary life in the right way in a more refined psychology. What is present in the waking state as facts of the soul's life can be recognized through strengthened thinking. That is why I gave the example of the soul waking up through the dream world into the waking state and linked it to the strengthening of strengthened thinking. But when we now do exercises of the will, thereby entering into the spiritual world and also being able to gain an image of our soul after death when we have left the body, then we also get to know the moment of falling asleep more precisely for our ordinary life. At first, we experience falling asleep in such a way that the sharply defined ideas that permeate our soul during waking hours gradually become darker and darker. But now we know that when we pass through the gate of sleep, our consciousness is not killed, but only paralyzed; and by experiencing that we now also live in a strengthened will, we can now also consider the states in which the soul is when it enters the spiritual world after falling asleep. There we experience how the soul becomes more and more immersed in an overall feeling for the world, and when falling asleep, what is seized in a very special way is what is opposed to the pictorial character of dreaming. When we wake up, the soul is more inclined to express in dream images what it has experienced during sleep; when we fall asleep, however, we also enter into a kind of dream, which dampens down our daytime perceptions, but we move towards a general experience of the magnitude of the world. When waking up, thoughts are more likely to be grasped in the form of images, whereas when falling asleep, feelings and especially the devotional will are more likely to be grasped. In short, one now learns to recognize, to recognize psychologically, the transition of the soul as it experiences it when falling asleep, from the experience of one's own self to being devoted to the world in feeling and will.

One learns to recognize what paralyzes thoughts, what dampens them, but on the other hand also what allows the other soul powers to merge into the world, which, when experienced in a kind of state of consciousness while awake – and it can be experienced – represents the state in which the pious soul is, that pious soul that does not want to have its inner soul state clothed in thoughts and ideas, that wants precisely the ideas and thoughts to be subdued in order to give feeling and emotion to the totality, to the majesty of the world, to the divine that permeates the world. In short, through anthroposophical research one gets to know both the state where the human being strives towards thoughts and the state where he strives away from thoughts, and one learns to see through both states at a higher level. One learns to recognize that the human being lives in such a way that he first moves out of the universe to use his body, and then moves back towards the universe when he leaves his body again. The states that are then taken over into consciousness are the states of everyday knowledge and everyday piety; but these states are raised to a higher level in supersensible contemplation, which is achieved through anthroposophical schooling.

Thus it can be said that the scientific character of the soul is not taken away by entering the supersensible worlds through anthroposophical schooling, for what one has gained as a scientific conviction, as the state of mind that goes with it, is carried up when one tries to fathom what the said second personality sees in the supersensible world. On the other hand, however, what the soul selflessly wants to submit to, what it wants to immerse itself in, is woven into the ideas. This does not lose its majesty at all, this does not lose the character of its holiness at all, by being brought out of the mystery and brought to intimate inner vision, by which it makes us look up to it with devotion, with reverence. The way in which anthroposophy brings the mystery into the soul, where it can be grasped, does not take away its sacred character. And so anthroposophy seeks to maintain a scientific approach to knowledge, not only in relation to the objects of ordinary experience, but also to maintain a scientific approach to knowledge of the supersensible. Just as nothing is taken from nature when we know it in the right way, through devotion to its beauty and to its majestic peculiarities, so nothing is taken from what is supersensible when it is brought down into direct human experience in its true form, not in an abstract form.

Thus it is that one cannot convince oneself of the scientific character of anthroposophy through a cursory definition or through cursory logical discussions of the criteria of scientificity, but rather by living oneself into into the course of anthroposophical research. The person who reflects on it must convince himself that here there is real scientificity, and one that certainly does not prevent the supersensible from taking on a religious character again. And so one would like to say: Anthroposophy has the courage to proceed with scientific exactness, with a scientific attitude and scientific method where the ground of the outer sensuality no longer exists. Anyone who objects, saying that there is no ground at all there, is like someone who would say the following: Just as a stone is attracted to the earth and falls until it can rest on it when we live on earth, so all things on earth are attracted to it and must ultimately rest on the earth's surface. This is true as long as we move within the orbit of the [earth] planet. But the moment we ascend from the conditions on our earth to those in our planetary system, we are dealing with something different; there the planets support each other, and they do not need any special ground as a base. Anyone who wanted to say that there must be a special world ground so that the planets do not fall into the depths would be saying something foolish. So it is here too. If we apply the same exactitude of the outer science to the anthroposophical field of research, we find that the two mutually support each other. The totality of supersensible science, the totality of anthroposophy, arises from the mutual support of the individual truths.

Thus, Anthroposophy has the courage to further develop science from the sensory to the supersensory, and it ensures that the scientific character is not lost. But it is not so timid that it believes that mystery must necessarily prevail over what the supersensible world is, so that man may retain his piety. No! Anthroposophy has the courage to affirm that the greatness of something does not only have its greatness for man because it is unknown to him, but it proves its greatness even when it is known; and through the familiarity with what religious content is, religion must not be thought of as diminished.

Thus anthroposophy seeks to justify itself in the face of the two accusations I characterized at the beginning of today's reflection. For it seeks to penetrate into the supersensible world with full respect for science, and it also seeks to develop the courage to bring down the supersensible into the human heart. And this supersensible is great enough to fill the human heart in such a way that this heart can still develop in true devotion even when the secret is revealed!

If you travel from here to Basel, take the electric train to Aeschenplatz and then the route to Dornach, you will find there on the neighboring hill a building that is not yet completed but already shows the intentions associated with it, even in its exterior. This building, which is called a free university for spiritual science, is intended to represent externally represent that which is striven for by this spiritual movement, which calls itself: an anthroposophically oriented spiritual-scientific movement.

Now that the building has visibly manifested the existence of such a movement, one can already hear and read many things about the foundations of this spiritual cultural movement. Of course, there are still exceptions to be found, but in general, there are accurate descriptions of these endeavors. On the whole, however, it may still be said today that what is said or written about it in public is quite the opposite of what this movement is really striving for. It is very often described as an unscientific, obscure, and, in the worst sense, mystical movement. It is very often described as if it wanted to oppose this or that, societies, creeds, and the like. In truth, this movement and this Dornach building, the Goetheanum, through which it is represented, wants to serve those longings, those goals, which today often live so unconsciously in the human soul, in the human soul of the broadest masses, which in many respects have not yet found the form to express themselves, but which are connected with all that which should lead present and future humanity out of the cultural chaos, which can be perceived by anyone who is unbiased, and from which everyone who is unbiased must extricate themselves in the present.

If one is to indicate from historical phenomena where, I would say, the main nerve of this movement lies, then perhaps to something that seems quite remote from today's man, that also seems to belong to quite abstract regions of thought and imagination, but which only needs to be developed for the most general and broadest human interests in order to lead us to the very thing that today's culture needs for its renewal, for its rebirth. I would like to point out what Goethe strove for, based on the full breadth and depth of his world view, which is still far from being sufficiently appreciated today. I would like to point out what he strove for as an insight into the living world in contrast to the dead, inanimate, inorganic world.

What Goethe strove for in terms of knowledge was closely connected with his entire spiritual striving, and he drew the best that his world view contains from the contemplation of art, but he extended what he had gained from the contemplation of art to actual scientific knowledge, as he had to view it in the sense of the breadth and scope of his world view. Goethe allowed himself to be influenced, admittedly with regard to the plant world, which was so dear to him, and his contemplation of it, everything that could be available to him in relation to the plant world from the science of his time; but it can be said that nothing that he could find in the science of his time was sufficient to explain the essence of the secrets of this plant world. And so, out of the originality of his nature, he himself turned his comprehensive gaze over the whole plant world, as far as it was accessible to him, over all its forms, and sought a unity out of the diversity, out of the variety of plants. He sought that out of the variety of the plant which he called his primal plant. When you hear the definition of what he meant by his idea, it may seem abstract, but it is not. By his original plant, Goethe meant a unified image, of which every plant, whatever external form it may take, is an image, a unified, ideal, spiritual entity with which one can traverse the plant world and which is revealed, so to speak, in every single plant.

“Such a primal plant - as Goethe wrote from Italy to his friends in Weimar - such a unitary plant, which can only be created in the mind and is nowhere to be seen in the external world, must surely exist - so he said, seemingly abstractly. How else could one know that a single is a plant?

But it matters little what his abstract opinion of these things was. What matters more is that he had the faith, the profound and coherent belief in the essence of things, which is expressed in the following words. He said and wrote about this archetypal plant: “If you have grasped it in spirit, then it must be possible not only to compare and recognize with it the plant forms that are out there in the world, but it must be possible to inwardly and spiritually devise plant forms yourself that, even if they do not exist, could exist.”

This is a weighty and momentous saying. For what does a man, a man of insight, who wishes to grasp such a spiritual idea want? He wants nothing less than to evoke in his soul a thought that can lead him, I might say, to use his own expression, to invent an external reality that can then take shape. He wants to become so inwardly related to what grows in plants, to what grows in living things in general, that he has in his own spirit, in his own thinking, in his own imagination, what is revealed outwardly in growth as power. He wants to immerse himself inwardly with his whole being in the outer world. This striving is much more significant than what Goethe achieved with it in detail. As I said, if we characterize it only in relation to the plant world, which may interest some but not others, and if we characterize it only in relation to the plant world, which Goethe wanted, it may seem abstract to some. But in this kind of spiritual endeavour there is something that can be extended to the whole extent of human knowledge, of the human view of the world.

Then one rises from the contemplation of the individual, insignificant living creature to that of the whole human being, the human being who not only contains, when one ascends to his wholeness, that which today's external natural science observes, which in many ways the materialistic sense of the time regards as the only thing about man, but which encompasses body, soul and spirit.

Goethe started from natural science. What is called anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, on the one hand, starts from Goethe, in that it seeks to develop the kind of world view that processes and allows to be revealed in the spirit that which is as intimately related to reality as Goethe's idea of the Primordial Plant is intimately related to the individual plant; on the other hand, this spiritual movement is in complete harmony with the true scientific attitude of our time, not with some obscure mysticism. And it is in complete harmony with a genuine, honest and contemporary religious endeavor of the human spirit in modern times. In past years, I have often spoken in this place of the fact that anthroposophy, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, by no means underestimates the importance of this natural science, with its enormous influence on modern culture. Indeed, it appreciates this natural science much better than many of those who want to stand on the ground of this natural science. Anyone who has not just adopted the popular prejudices about science and believes that they are a true scientist, but who has consciously immersed themselves in what science can achieve for the overall education of the human soul and mind, must say: if science, as it has developed over the past three to four centuries, but particularly in the course of the second half of the 19th century, would fully grasp itself in its own essence, would those who pursue it fully understand their own nature, then this natural science would already proclaim today of its own accord what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to proclaim. This natural science would speak of itself as human soul and human spirit, of that which is of eternal value in the human being.

Why does not natural science do this, although it so conscientiously, with such penetrating methods, penetrates into the outer sensual reality of nature? Why does not this natural science, on the other hand, rise in the same way as Goethe did for the plant world, to such an inner processing of the idea of nature that one becomes one with creative nature itself in one's inner being?

To answer this question, one must look back a little on the historical development of humanity in modern times. In natural science itself, great and powerful progress has been made. We need only go back to the work of Copernicus and Galileo, to see how much our understanding of nature has developed up to the present day. But at the same time, we must consider how little this scientific work was actually completely free in terms of its entire rule, in terms of its entire work within the intellectual life of modern civilization. It was not, because not a unified world view emerged in the course of the more recent development of humanity, which, in addition to free, independent natural science, also tried to penetrate into the nature of the external sense world. In the external sense world there were monopolies, monopolies for the knowledge of soul and spirit. The religious world views continued to retain certain ideas about soul and spirit. And they managed to get the public to admit, more or less voluntarily, that only they had anything to say about the human soul, about the human spirit.

Natural scientists, like other people, were influenced by what I would call a monopoly on knowledge about soul and spirit. And they limited themselves, because they did not dare to ascend from the knowledge of the world to the knowledge of the soul world, to the world of the spirit; they limited themselves to saying: Yes, natural science has its limits; it must limit itself to the sense world alone. A mind such as Goethe's, which was certainly imbued with a reverent religious impulse throughout his life, sensing a divine element in all of nature and in the whole world, always felt the necessity to shape his view of the physical, the , the soul and the spiritual.

But we must consider the situation of natural science, which is to some extent under the influence of the monopoly of knowledge just mentioned. We must consider what natural science can give to man through its own efforts. Then one will understand such a unified striving for knowledge and spirit as was present in Goethe. Those who do not allow themselves to be oppressed, I would say, by the commandment, 'Thou shalt not know soul and spirit', will undergo a spiritual education precisely through the way in which the modern spirit tries to penetrate the secrets of natural science. And this education then gives the stimulus to continue the development of the human spirit to higher levels of development than those that one simply has by being born a human being.

But to understand such stages of development, one needs a certain intellectual modesty. This intellectual modesty is very necessary for the present human being. This intellectual modesty must lead the present human being to say to himself: You are not only a being that may have developed from lower organisms in the process of the evolution of the world order to its present perfection, but you are a being that can develop itself further, has developed itself further in this life; so that the forces that you received at birth can experience a higher and ever higher education.

You see, you have to be able to say the following. You have to be able to look impartially at a five-year-old child holding a volume of Goethe's lyric poems. This five-year-old child will truly not be able to do much with Goethe's volume of lyric poems, at least not what the adult human being knows how to do with Goethe's volume of lyric poems. It will perhaps tear the volume apart or do something else with it. It must first grow up, then it will treat the volume of Goethe's lyric poems in the right way. Its development must be taken into account. For although as a five-year-old child everything contained in the volume of lyric poems is before the eyes of this human being, the possibility does not yet exist for this human being to draw out of this volume of lyric poems everything that could be in it for him. Thus the human being of the present must learn to feel his way in relation to the whole expanse of nature and the world. He must be able to say to himself with intellectual modesty: You stand before nature in such a way that, owing to your present development, it cannot give you what it truly contains within itself; one must be able to assume the possibility of taking one's development into one's own hands, so that, by attaining a higher level of development attain a higher level of development than that which one simply acquires by birth, by then being able to treat what one always has before one, what one believes to recognize - like the five-year-old child who does not yet know what to do with it - in such a way that it reveals to one all the secrets it holds. The very effort that one makes when applying the scientific method today, when applying it intensively, the depth that one penetrates, can lead one to feel that, out of the effort of the spirit, a power is awakened that enables one to undergo such a development. It is truly not due to modern natural science that people are so reluctant to admit that man can undergo development! No, it is due to the pressure that I have just characterized, and which one must only look at without prejudice in order to be able to devote oneself freely to what lies in the scientific treatment of the world itself. Then one will feel that the soul is inwardly awakened precisely by looking at nature in the modern sense, that forces arise in it that were not there before. As a rule, it is precisely today's scientists who do not bring themselves to awaken these forces. But if they could bring themselves to do so, they would be in a position to proclaim what is sought in the problem of the immortality of the soul, the eternity of the human spirit. Scientific thinking and a scientific attitude can lead to an inner awakening of the human spirit. And this can then be continued and systematically developed.

How this is possible, I have often outlined from this place and described in detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in the second part of my “Occult Science”. One can continue in full self-education that which one notices developing through modern scientific knowledge. One can apply to the spirit that which is called meditation, concentration of thought-life, of feeling, of will. One can develop that inner world of ideas to such an extent, or at least the ideas that one applies by observing stars, by working in a chemical-physical laboratory, by observing plants or people or animals externally; one can further develop the inner spiritual power that you apply by devoting your thoughts to such an extent that you only want to live in these thoughts until at least the thought leads the soul to grasp inner connections. You cannot grasp them if you do not allow your soul to develop such inner self-culture. It is possible to awaken an inner soul culture. You can indeed achieve such an awakening so that your ordinary life, which you live out in ordinary science, seems like a sleep from which you awaken. And from this awakening one can observe anew what surrounds one as the world.

That is one thing that the modern human being can undergo. If he applies natural science in the right, I would say Goethean way, he will come to a religious realization, to a real spiritual realization.

But also from the life of the modern human being itself emerges that leads to such a path and, I would say, to a corresponding goal for the future.

Those who look at history superficially, as it is usually presented superficially today, do not have the real history in front of them. One must look more inwardly at the historical life of men. One must be able to compare, for example, how a person in the 9th or 10th century AD was in his entire state of mind, and how a person of the present day is, even if he is a person living in the simplest, most primitive way; for even the simplest person today differs quite significantly from the person of the 9th or 10th century AD. I do not want to go back any further. People are definitely in a state of development. Today, we have to take the word “development” not only in the limited sense in which natural science usually takes it. It must be possible to use it in a much broader sense if one wants to penetrate into the essence of human development.

It must be possible to say that a number of centuries ago, that is, in the centuries I have just mentioned, people were much closer to each other within certain associations. Before this relatively short time, a person was connected to his neighbor through blood or tribal ties. This closeness, which brought people together into associations relatively recently, no longer exists in modern times. If you are unbiased, you can see this everywhere. Modern man is much more closed in on himself; I would go so far as to say that modern man has become much more of a loner in his soul. People in older times did not pass each other by as people in newer times do. People in newer times have become more estranged from each other. But I would like to say that something else arises from a spiritual conscience than arose for people centuries ago. It arises - again one can see it if one looks into one's own soul without prejudice and has a sense for such things, again one can perceive something like an inner voice - it arises as something like an inner obligation: You should now, since you no longer feel close enough to those immediately closest to you through blood or tribal ties, be able to come close to them through your soul development. You should take up his will in a real human love within you. You should not pass him by so that you can live socially with him, but you should be able to take up his will into yours, to make his thoughts your thoughts. You should be able to think, feel and want with his inner soul state in your inner soul state. You should be able to approach him spiritually and soulfully.

Just as engaging with natural science represents a kind of awakening for the soul, a kind of waking up in the ordinary consciousness that one otherwise has in everyday life and in ordinary science, if one only looks at ordinary science correctly, then this ordinary science gives, I would say, inner social duties that awaken more and more in man. It represents something that can be described in contrast to this awakening – I will have to express it somewhat paradoxically now, but some of the truths that must be incorporated into cultural life today must still sound paradoxical – it can be described as a feeling that overcomes us when we feel inwardly: we must be close to our neighbor in spirit and soul, we must live in his will, his thoughts; it is something that feels like losing ourselves in people. This losing of self in our neighbor in his spiritual and soul life, this devotion to our neighbor, is actually the basis of the much caricatured process of social feeling in the present.

And if one says: natural science can awaken us - this feeling, I would like to say, brings about the opposite state of mind, a strange state of mind, if one can only understand it. But just as little as one becomes aware of the awakening from the natural scientific method, just as little does one become aware of this feeling of empathy for one's neighbor. But modern man will be increasingly seized by it. Then, in contrast to the awakening through science, they will feel this like falling asleep, like resting in the surroundings, like the transition of one's own soul into the soul of the other. And just as the mysterious life of a dream awakens, full of life, out of natural sleep, so can awakening come out of this devotion to what is humanly and soulfully alive, which will increasingly take hold of modern humanity more and more as a duty of conscience. It is a kind of sleep in the human environment; but out of it rises something like a dream from natural sleep. And this dream from natural sleep can be compared to what will emerge more and more from the real, not the caricatured social feeling.

This dream will give rise to that which tells the human being: See, by immersing yourself in the will that is developing alongside your will, by becoming one with the thought that develops alongside your thoughts, you know how you are inwardly connected to this person.

Just as Goethe sensed something that was given to him through his idea of the primal plant, which he had to describe as a way of living into the whole power of the plant world itself, so one lives into the living environment of the human world, precisely through the most modern feeling. And again, something awakens in you from this living into the human world, which now arises like a new realization precisely from social life. You feel connected with the being of the other person. You feel as if something in you, as if a dream, is speaking through the being of the other person, bearing witness to you: you were already connected with this person in times gone by.

From this real experience, from this genuinely modern experience, what has already grown for individual favored spirits, such as Lessing, will grow for newer humanity as a real experience, as a real experience. If you want to be pedantic, even if it is in a higher sense, you can say: Lessing, such a person was certainly great, but in his old age, when he was already half demented, he wrote his 'Education of the Human Race' and came up with the crazy idea that humanity lives in repeated lives on earth. But for those who are not pedants but who can really penetrate the development of a man like Lessing, it is quite clear that such a man was only the forerunner for all those who will come to know this peculiarity, this mighty experience, which will arise out of the rightly understood social feeling, will arise out of it, full of life, like a dream; but it will be a dream full of life, not just like dreaming, the having been connected with people whom one meets again in earthly life, the having been connected in earlier earthly lives, with looking at the fact that one will be together with them again in later earthly lives. The experience of repeated earthly lives will develop out of the right social life and feelings of modern man.

Natural science, in its research, has already come to the conclusion that it no longer wants to be purely materialistic, at least in the case of some minds. But when the ordinary natural scientist wants to prove that something lives in man that is spiritual and soul-like, that is not merely an expression of the body, then he does not turn to such phenomena that he can prove, that he can present as one presents phenomena of the laboratory, the clinic and the like, but he turns precisely to the abnormal phenomena of human life. And I would like to say that it has become fashionable to examine the world of dreams, which awakens so mysteriously from its natural sleep, in order to point out how the human being also has a spiritual and a soul element within him. But that means examining everything that arises from the phenomena of suggestion, hypnosis, somnambulism, mediumship, and so on. Here too, it is tempting to confuse anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which seeks to draw on a sound knowledge of nature and a sound experience of the human world, with that which would like to lean on such phenomena as hypnotism, somnambulism and the like for a real exploration of the human spiritual and soul nature.

We can start from the world of dreams to get a little closer to these phenomena. We can point out how this world of dreams conjures up images before people, into the human soul, in the time between falling asleep and waking up, when the human being is not fully connected to his spiritual and soul life to the resting body. But the one who can properly study this dream world will never answer the question, “What is this dream world?” “This world of dreams is something that takes people beyond their ordinary external daily lives.” – Then, for the unbiased person, it is quite clear that all sorts of things must interfere in this dream world that come only from the lower, animal-like instincts of human nature.

Consider Just consider what a person is capable of doing in a dream, how he tends towards the lower drives, how he often tends towards a life of crime in what he imagines in his dreams. Man must say to himself: he is not transported into some higher spiritual realm when he dreams, but on the contrary, he has descended into the subhuman. Truly, it is a dream itself when people today want to claim, want to claim quite willingly, that in their dreams they are transported into a higher world. No, in a dream we are brought into a lower world than the one we see through our senses. And especially when a person is subjected to the influence of some suitable fellow human being, so that he is placed in the sleep-like state of hypnosis, one can even, I might say, exert irresponsible influences on the person by acting in a kind of sleep-like state. Then he regards a potato as a pear and eats it as a pear, purely because he is being suggested, this idea is being given to him: this potato is a pear. And still completely different things can be given to him! It is only the extreme state, which also otherwise exists as, I would like to say, not a completely permissible state, where one counts on the damping down of consciousness by the other person, and wants to persuade him, I would like to say, to rape ideas. For those who work in the sense of true spiritual science, the question arises: what is the state of mind in which a person is in a dream? What is the state of mind in which a person is when he is in such a hypnotic or mediumistic - which is also similar to a hypnotic state - when he is in such a hypnotic state and can experience such influences from any fellow human being or from other surroundings?

In a hypnotic state, it is indeed possible for thought transfers to occur over long distances; they can be demonstrated and proven experimentally. But the question arises as to what regions a person, with his entire human, physical, mental and spiritual being, is brought when one descends into these regions. One then brings him into a region that is subhuman, that represents the animalistic in man.

In fact, man is being hypnotized down, profaned down into that which plays in him as animalistic. And it is precisely through this that one gets to know the animal in man, which is nevertheless something quite different from the animal in the animal series; but one enters into the region of the subhuman.

In contrast to all that is presented here, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here would like to lead to the attainment of the soul-spiritual in man, not by dampening what is already in man in order to seemingly feel something spiritual-soul, but that one develops up what is already there in the sense world to a higher insight by educating thought, will, feeling through meditation, concentration, as it is presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds?” Anthroposophical spiritual science aims to lead people beyond themselves, in a healthy way, beyond what is already there in sensory perception and ordinary science.

In this way, it enters into a region that is quite new compared to the external sensory world. This is very important in order to realize that man becomes dependent when he is placed in a hypnotic, a somnambulistic, or a mediumistic state, or even when he merely surrenders himself to the dream-world of fantasy, that he becomes dependent on his outer sensory environment in a way in a way that he is no longer dependent when he surrenders to normal sensory life; when we surrender to sensory life in an awake state, then our will can avert our eyes from something that we do not want to look at, can even pay a little attention to what we hear. In short, we are more powerful through our will when we relate to our surroundings through the senses. What is placed in the freedom of our will, what brings us into a free relationship when we perceive sensually in an awake state, becomes a relationship of compulsion, as it is in animality, when we are subdued in the waking state through hypnosis. In this state we do not discover the soul in man, but that in us which is animalistic and which is otherwise veiled by our free spirituality. What is otherwise veiled comes to the surface and dominates the person. Man is organized down to the animal. Only one does not recognize - since the human being does not behave like the animal, but expresses himself more spiritually - that it is nevertheless a matter of a downward organization to animality. In contrast to this, what anthroposophical spiritual science wants is to raise the human being to a higher level of consciousness, and only through this does one recognize that which presents itself at a lower level of consciousness. For when man develops his spiritual nature as I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” then a different relationship to the world also arises. But not the world that presents itself when we are hypnotized or in a mediumistic state, or when we become somnambulant, not the world of our ordinary sensory surroundings presents itself, but a new world, a spiritual world, a world which man has not known before, but which presents itself to him as a real one, just as the outer sense world presents itself to the senses as a real world.

You see, the human being can undergo this development by ascending from the human into a superhuman, just as he descends from hypnosis, from somnambulism, into an inhuman. This development can be undergone, and in this way the human being can ascend to an immediate perception, an immediate experience of the spiritual. In this way, the spirit can enter into human consciousness.

Now one can certainly say that in a book such as this one, “How to Know Higher Worlds,” it is shown which development one must undergo in order to comprehend that the true world, which one gets to know in this way, is the real one, as I have described it. But not everyone can become a spiritual researcher themselves, not everyone can enter this spiritual world themselves so that they can make statements from this spiritual world. However, the one who reaches that development, which, where one knows about the existence of a spiritual, a supersensible world, has always been called the world beyond the threshold of ordinary consciousness, who enters this world, in which he has the spiritual around him as one has the sensual around him for ordinary consciousness, he makes his discoveries in the spiritual. He knows, for example, through these discoveries, that through that which appears today in man, by having him in a hypnotic, somnambulant state, by becoming a medium, his ordinary consciousness is subdued. What appears in man as the subhuman, that in truth represents an earlier stage of human development, and that which today develops as his sensory perception, his intellectual perception, that represents a later stage of development. And even that can be recognized - you can read about it in “Occult Science” - that today, when a person is put under hypnosis, it becomes apparent in an abnormal way how he was in his environment in an evolution of the earth world that lies far behind what geological external science presents to us as the evolution of the earth. One can even learn something about a much more spiritual state of the Earth, in which man also already existed and perceived his surroundings as he perceives his surroundings today when his consciousness is dulled. We recognize something of the past of the earth, which was not as the Kant-Laplace theory presents it, but was as a spiritual-soul being itself, in which man was embedded as a being of the senses. And on the other hand, man of the earthly future will recognize where the earth will be more spiritual again, where man, through his natural condition, will recognize as one recognizes today when one develops the soul further, as I have described it.

These knowledge, although it is a need of the newer, the modern man, will initially, I would say, only be attained by individual people. Individual people will enter into that region of life that lies beyond the threshold of ordinary consciousness. So much is necessary if one really wants to come to these higher realizations. You see, I will give you a simple higher realization. But in this simple higher realization, the one who comes to it sees, for example, what the attainment of higher realizations, the discovery of higher realizations, is actually based on. In the usual story, it is not known today that basically the development of all humanity is just as internally conditioned as the development of the individual human being. Who would not find it ridiculous today if someone were to say: a person who lives to be seven, fourteen, twenty years old and so on is always the result of what he eats and drinks; what he eats causes the child to develop further and further from childhood on, making it an adult. Everyone knows that this is not the case, that a person goes through certain stages of development that even lead to certain leaps in natural development. We have such a clear leap, for example, around the seventh year, when the teeth change. Those who have an understanding of such things know what powerful revolutions take place in the human organism, for example, when sexual maturity occurs; later on, the changes are no longer as clearly and distinctly perceptible, but they are nevertheless present. Something develops in man that springs from the depths of his being. But it is the same for all of humanity. And so it was around the middle of the 15th century of our era that humanity took a leap in its development. The state of mind of people has become quite different. What I have characterized today as the fact that man feels lonely in relation to other people, that he is closed in on himself, that he no longer feels close to people through mere blood relationship as he used to. This growing independence, this becoming personal, has developed in step with the change of teeth, the onset of sexual maturity, in the individual human being, in the individual human organization. So, out of the whole evolution of mankind, something came in the middle of the 15th century. Such knowledge can only come from the spiritual world. And only when one has gained such knowledge, as an inner fact of experience, can one also have an opinion about the realities of repeated earthly lives, about the path of the spirit in human development, about the life of the spirit in natural existence, and so on.

But everything that can be done to arrive at such knowledge can be prepared for through meditation, concentration, and the devotion of thoughts, feelings, and impulses of the will, as described in “How to Know Higher Worlds.” One can develop and then say to oneself, “You are now ready to receive higher knowledge.” But then one must wait. The nature of spiritual science does not allow one to go out and collect knowledge; one can only prepare one's own soul; then one must wait. Then one must, I might say, wait for the moment, which one feels like a gracious effect from the spiritual world; one must wait until the illumination comes. That illuminations from the spiritual world occur in one person but not in another. That is why the truths arise in some people, who must communicate them to their fellow human beings. Even when such simple realizations arise, such as the turning point in the whole development of humanity in the 15th century, one must have become acquainted with them in one's pure soul life today. One must have learned to renounce the forcible conquest of the spiritual world; one must have worked only on the development of the soul in order to prepare oneself to receive the truths. Then they come, come at the appropriate moment. One must limit oneself to accepting them as such individual truths. One must only be clear about one thing: if one wants to draw consequences from them, as some people do, then one only brings forth caricatures of the spiritual world. Let us suppose that some man has made various inner discoveries; he comes to an idea; then he builds a whole system out of it, a system of nature, a system of history, an economic or a social system, or something. Men are not satisfied with making such individual spiritual experiences, but continue to draw their conclusions, building systems upon them. The one who is experienced in the spiritual world only works on his spiritual development so that he is ready to receive what reveals itself to him. Then he again accepts such an individual experience and waits for another to arise. Just as in the external, sensory reality, one must wait for the new experience to approach, one must always be inwardly filled with resignation, through which one can wait until the individual inner realizations arise. Otherwise one often produces figments of the imagination. And because most people only have such hazy fantasies, they think that the laws that come into play only come from fantasies. But in truth, no figments of the imagination arise when a person makes an effort to move forward. Only when he does not make an effort to gain ideas about the invisible does he arrive at figments of the imagination. But only if he strives to let all thoughts and development, all work in the spirit, aim solely at the spirit becoming more and more perfect in its cognitive faculty, then he can get sufficiently far; when he has learned to wait, then the discoveries in the spiritual world present themselves to him through that which is to be communicated in the spiritual world. Man can, of course, come to discoveries himself if his fate, I might say, is favorable in this respect and he learns to wait. But above all, he can come to recognize as truth what spiritual discoverers tell him, and to acquire the judgments through such an inner development that he can also he receives from the other person as the truth.

This is the secret of life that people will live when the spirit becomes their guide in the world of the senses and in the supersensible world. This will be the peculiarity that human coexistence will become more intimate. Today we see an illusory, a misunderstood socialism, we see how people want to work socially, but actually become more and more socially distant from each other. But then, when people realize that they can develop to the point where they can acknowledge what the other person comes to through the intimacies of his inner life, through which he makes spiritual discoveries, then they will be able to enrich themselves spiritually in their lives together. Then one will realize that it is precisely when the spirit will be the guide in the sensory realm of man that the social life will be able to receive its true meaning through this spirit.

If one really wants to consciously cross the threshold, penetrating into spiritual worlds presupposes that one, in a sense, becomes fearless in the face of the experiences of the spiritual world. The ordinary world of the senses allows us, I would say, to be cradled in a certain sense of security. But the one who crosses over from this world of the senses, over the threshold of the spiritual world, into the real spiritual worlds that underlie our world of the senses, experiences the fact that, as it were, the comfortable, firm ground is no longer under him. The spiritual world does not have the same forces of gravity and the like as this world of the senses. Within the spiritual world, man feels as if he were on a surging sea, and the security that one otherwise has through a fixed point of view in the external world of the senses, through ordinary life, this security must be provided by inner strength, through which one steers through the spiritual world.

Furthermore, you must bear in mind that when you enter this spiritual world, you are not initially adapted to it. You are adapted to a world as a human being between birth and death; you are not adapted to that which reveals itself as eternal to human nature when you enter the spiritual world. You are adapted to this world, to the world here. When one enters the spiritual world after having developed in order to enter it, one feels, as long as one is still in the body and has not yet passed through the portal of death, that one is not yet adapted for the whole process of development. One often feels this as a burning pain, I might say. Many shrink from it. Only if one prepares well to experience one thing or the other, can one rise above oneself, can one venture out onto the open sea of spiritual knowledge, on which one must have the guide, the spiritual guide within oneself.

But it is already possible for every person today, if they observe such things as I have presented in “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds », to see from his own conviction, not through reasoning, that what the spirit-discoverers, the modern seers, can really reveal to the world is based on truth and taken from reality.

Human coexistence will result from the fact that we can learn to see when the other person develops the ability to fully recognize what has been discovered. A spiritual coexistence will arise that will provide the basic power for a life that humanity will need in the future, especially if some structures in the social organism are to be overcome that have emerged from old forces and which can only be overcome by new spiritual forces that develop from soul to soul.

Precisely because the spiritual will become a reality for people, precisely because of this people will come closer together. One only has to consider whether a person discovers this or that in the spiritual world; that depends on the way his life is. Isn't it true that a person's knowledge of the external world of the senses differs depending on whether he was born in Europe or America or Asia. In the same way, every person's knowledge of the spiritual world differs, depending on whether he is a spiritual explorer, a seer. The knowledge of the other person, who in turn has different knowledge, is a supplement to his own knowledge. People will know different things from the spirit. But they will be able to complement each other.

In the face of real spiritual knowledge, as it is meant and presented here today, there is truly no shame or anything degrading if one person, in a truly social existence, simply accepts what is transmitted to him from the spiritual world, while another person is able to discover it. There is no need to fear that some man who becomes a spiritual discoverer will shine through immodesty within his community of fellow human beings. On the contrary, anyone who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world must first acquire what I have called intellectual modesty in the corresponding high power, and he knows very well, especially when he begins to know something of the spiritual world, how little he actually knows. There is no danger of those who recognize spiritual things becoming particularly proud. Those who talk about the spiritual world in empty phrases, who talk about the spirit without knowing anything about it, who talk about it through mere philosophical conclusions, they may become proud. But those who penetrate into the spiritual worlds also know how small they are as human beings in the face of this spiritual world, which wants to realize itself through them, and they truly know that they should neither be arrogant nor dogmatic.

Now I would like to mention something else. On the one hand, it must be said that for the sake of the future of humanity, it is necessary today that those who have not yet discovered certain truths listen to those who have discovered them, and that this is by no means shameful, degrading to freedom, it can also be pointed out that even the one who can perhaps recognize to a high degree, who is a seer, learns tremendous things from his fellow human beings. That is the remarkable thing, that in this direction one gains a completely new relationship to one's fellow human beings precisely through seership, precisely through the development of the soul-spiritual. We must not forget that things can reveal themselves even in a simple, elementary way of life. We experience them, we have the sense to penetrate into what, as mysterious soul-spiritual depths, are also revealed, for example, through a child. This gives us cause, if only we do not interpret it symbolically, if only we do not brood over it, but give ourselves to it in love, to recognize spiritually that afterwards, when the seer has exercised such love for the simple, the blessed moment comes for him to recognize something great. And every great, real spiritual seer will be able to tell you about those moments when, not through the interpretation of what he has just seen, but through the actual experience of this power within him, he has subsequently learned something different from some human being, by choosing the spirit as his guide. You get to know a person. What they share with you from their experiences, from their experiences, perhaps as the simplest, most primitive person, leads you into the depths of the soul, if you are able to recognize correctly, to find the right context. You make the discovery that what people experience, what people learn, can lead to a revelation in every person.

Yes, over the whole wide circumference of human beings, when we choose the spirit as our guide to the world of the senses and the supersensible world, every human being can give us something of what he has gained from the world, and something can be revealed in us that is absolutely necessary for his further development. We often notice that people themselves do not apply to their lives with their inadequate powers what they believe they have in their consciousness, in their conscious soul life; they think it is something highly unimportant because people are inadequate to see through their own judgment to see the supersensible. If one looks into the depths of the human soul, if one has acquired the sense in this way, as I have described it today, then, as a spiritual researcher, one can also gain so much in modern natural science, through the way in which natural science works in clinics, in observatories, in chemical and physical laboratories. If we accept what the researchers, with their power of judgment, often understand from their own very inadequate understanding when they describe their work and their results, which they themselves do not really achieve with what they say about it, cannot reveal in its depths, if we accept what we are told about the work in the scientific workshops, then deep natural secrets are revealed to us. And precisely through what spiritual science does in this field, what medicine so often strives for today, what it cannot achieve with its own means, what is connected with what I have described, that medical science and natural science can be fertilized by spiritual science.

But social life will also be able to be fertilized when the spirit can become a guide through the sensual world and into the supersensible world. And there is no need to believe that the religious element, which should be one of the fundamental forces of every human being, will suffer from the knowledge of spiritual life, from the fact that spiritual life is taking hold among us and that the spirit is becoming a guide for people in the world of people! No, quite the opposite is the case. Precisely what the religious denominations themselves have sought, they could not attain to because of the needs that have arisen from healthy scientific life, in that they have preserved old traditions. As a result, they could only achieve what they wanted to create as a belief in the soul and spirit through dogmatic commandments, while in truth, when people come to make the spirit their guide in the world of the senses, they will be at one with their soul life in the spiritual. But people who recognize the spirit, people who live with their ideas, with their perceptions in the spirit, they will also be able to worship the spirit, they will be able to find the way to truly religious worship. Those people who know nothing of the spirit will not be religious people even if they belong to a “word religion.” Those who have the spirit as their guide do not fear that Christianity could be damaged by the spirit being imbued with modern spiritual science. Oh no, those who say that spiritual knowledge should not come because it will undermine religious sentiment and Christianity show themselves to be small. He who truly recognizes the spirit cannot think so little of the power of the Christ impulse, which has been working in the world since the Mystery of Golgotha. He must think much higher. He must think in such a way that he says to himself: Whatever insights may come, the more one penetrates into the spirit, the better one will learn to worship that which can only be elevated in its significance for people by being recognized ever better and better recognized.

Not spiritual science will hinder the real religious development of mankind, but the desire to remain stuck beyond real knowledge and spiritual progress will have a hindering effect on religious development. And it could be that in the not too distant future, many people will realize where the obstacles to religious development actually come from. They will come from the fact that the denominations no longer want to live with what is present in the innermost human being as a need.

You see, I just wanted to show how the spirit can become man's guide through the world of the senses and into the supersensible world. I can only do this in a sketchy way in such a lecture as I was allowed to give here.

Man comes to know that within him which is eternal and immortal, which passes through birth and the gates of death, precisely by developing the spirit within him to which he belongs. He comes to recognize that through his soul and his spirit he belongs to the spiritual world, just as he belongs to this world through his body.

Today, however, the fact that I have characterized is fully alive in the depths of the subconscious. But the one who sees through things today knows that there are many people who long for such a spiritual fellowship; but in people's consciousness this is often not the case. In the broadest circles, I might say, there is still an aversion, an antipathy to such spiritual leadership. But anyone who is inside such a spiritual movement looks at the way in which spiritual movements or even external cultural movements have been met with in the course of the historical development of humanity! And if today one is wholeheartedly attached to the idea that something like the Dornach building, the School of Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum, as an external representative – it is not yet finished, it is only just being built, but hopefully it will be finished in the not too distant future – that something like this should stand as a visible sign of the spiritual movement that I have characterized in today's lecture, then one has to remember history in the face of various disparaging judgments.

Imagine what today's world would look like if, at the time when Columbus wanted to equip a few ships to steer westward into regions of which he truly knew nothing, and which the others knew nothing about either, if the opinion had triumphed. You can read about it in history that this opinion was very much present – that it regarded Columbus's intention as folly, as madness! But in the end, he won. Imagine what would have happened in modern times if it had not been the cleverness of those who refused Columbus's ships that had won, but the “madness” of Columbus that had won. For many people, this madness of Columbus is what anthroposophical spiritual science wants. Even today, for many people it is madness. But this madness does not just include that which is only a spiritual realization; no, this madness includes such a development of the spirit through which one also becomes a truly practical person, through which one becomes such a person that one can practically attack a voyage of discovery into real life. A real voyage of discovery into life is to be inaugurated through that for which this Dornach building is to be the external representative.

Therefore, many people may see madness in what is to be undertaken with it. Those who, through inner insight, have connected their hearts and minds with what is to be a symbol of the beginning of the spirit's guidance in the development of humanity through the sensual world and into the supersensible world, know that out of this “madness” must develop that which many people, and ultimately all people of the civilized world, must seek, so that we may emerge from some of what is sensed by the unprejudiced as chaotic, as cultural confusion, in order to arrive at that which numerous people and numerous souls long for after all, long for more than the contemporaries of Columbus longed for India in his time, long for the light that is to dawn for humanity, so that it can truly strive towards higher cultural goals in humanity.

If we reflect on the fact that we are familiarizing ourselves with this physical world here in the physical world, we will always come to the conclusion that we live in this world primarily through our physical senses, through our minds. We certainly also live within this physical world through our soul life, through the thoughts that arise in us, that remain in our memory, that make up our store of memories; we live in this world through our feelings and will impulses. It is quite understandable that it is quite unlikely for a person who has not yet dealt with spiritual-scientific questions in depth that an experience can take place that is quite different from that in the physical world; because it is clear that man initially knows the world only through thinking, feeling and willing. But there is another form of experience in the world through what we call initiation, which goes beyond the physical world. Basically, it is the same kind of experience as when a person passes through the gate of death and enters the time that lies between death and a new birth.

Now, it must be said that in most cases, what befalls a person when he is supposed to form an idea of the life between death and a new birth here in the physical body, is a feeling of a certain fear of the void in the soul. Let us be clear that this occurrence of fear is quite natural. For try to put yourself in the situation, purely physically, of having walked quite fast and coming to a deep precipice. This would give nothing more than a presentiment, a feeling: you cannot know what might happen in the next moment if you continued your steps. — This feeling can only then afflict the soul when the person has walked so fast that he can no longer stop himself. He says to himself: You have to take the next step. — The uncertainty of fear lives in the soul and this feeling can only be compared to the feeling that is always present in the depths of the soul, but is only not perceived because attention is focused on the physical world. This feeling tells him: What will happen to you if you leave everything you have become accustomed to? Man need only reflect that something like this can live in him subconsciously, and it also lives there, which can be expressed with the words: You cannot see or hear, because the instruments for this sensory activity have been taken from you; you cannot think either. These feelings are not realized, but they are in the soul, and what the person feels is a kind of numbing of himself over this feeling. As soon as it occurs, something else is called into the soul so that the feeling cannot come to consciousness. But with that one can also not make the right preparation, one cannot lift the veil that lies behind death. Today we want to enlighten ourselves about how our life is connected to the one after death.

In the physical world, we rightly speak of perceiving it through our senses. When man speaks of the senses, he actually speaks only of the senses that can be used in the physical world. They can only be used in the physical world because they are connected to the tools that are taken from us at death. Only the five senses are ever mentioned: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. However, these cannot be used in the disembodied state. It is necessary, if one wants to find a transition, that one must completely enumerate the human senses. What the human being misses in this enumeration is that he forgets himself in the process. But he still belongs to the physical world and he could not perceive himself here if he had no senses for it. There are initially few senses through which he perceives himself: the sense of balance, the sense of movement and the sense of life, but they are just as important as the other senses, the external senses. What is the sense of life? You can get an idea of it by considering the difference between feeling hunger and feeling satiety. If man did not understand himself inwardly, he would know nothing of his own corporeality, of well-being or malaise. Just as one speaks of the sense of sight, so one must speak of the sense of life.

But one must also speak of another sense. How impossible it would be for a person to feel if they did not feel the activity of their muscles and tendons. This is a perception of inner mobility. It is only somewhat obscured for humans because we see ourselves in the physical world with our physical eyes. You get the right feeling from the inner perception when you move in the dark; for example, the perception of the breathing process becomes more clearly apparent.

What we call the sense of balance is very necessary. It can be observed in children when they learn to walk and stand; little by little they feel their way into it. We have to get used to feeling that we are walking upright. This sense even has an organ; these are the three semicircular canals in the ear, which are perpendicular to each other. If they are damaged, a person falls over, and the lack of balance in some people comes from the fact that the inner sense of direction is damaged.

If we go further, we find other senses through which we can have a kind of self-awareness within us, but this is more difficult. We have to start from a certain contemplation that points to a state of consciousness that is no longer quite normal. It occurs in certain dreams. The following can occur in consciousness as a dream: a person is in terrible trouble, the helmsman has arrived. He dreams this in great detail, and it can be a long dream. It changes and then the rattling of wagons occurs; the fire brigade passes by. A fire has broken out. Outwardly nothing more has happened than the call “fire”. This word softly echoes the word “tax”, and it calls in the soul through the sound of the transition from the directly heard call “fire”, and that in turn gives birth to the sum of the annoying images of the dream. The dream runs terribly fast. You imagine the individual events in a timeline, which is why the dream seems so long. From this dream, we see the great importance of sounding in the soul body, especially when it is mixed with images, when the word plays a role. If we go deeper into the soul, we see that something completely different is actually going on. Only when a person is fast asleep does he not perceive things. Something would have happened even if the call for “fire” had not been heard at all, but now the call covers something and gives rise to the word “tax”. A fine veil is spun from the resonance of the word. In daytime life, the veil is terribly thick, but alongside the daytime perceptions, the subtle soul perceptions also occur. Only these are not perceived. In such a dream-vision we grasp the world-process as it presents itself to our soul, at one corner.

We have chosen this example deliberately because hearing, as it is now established in present-day humanity, is the sense that is closest to the supersensible senses. We are standing right on the border of the supersensible world and if we could cast off the two words, we would be able to experience true soul experiences.

This example shows how man stands before the spiritual world. But the two words hold him back. It is really the case that by far the greatest part of our dreams are spun from the echoes of the sense of hearing, because between hearing and thinking there lives an inner sense that has been completely atrophied for today's life. When one has immersed oneself in the spiritual world, this sense comes into activity. Between hearing and thinking lives this sense, which becomes conscious when one can hear the inaudible, when one has awakened the sense for rhythmic, melodic, harmonious sounds... (gap in the text.)

If one does not advance to a sense that has meaning only for the physical world, one stands before a sense of the supersensible world. In the physical world, this sense has split into the sense of hearing and the sense of perception. It comes to the fore when one comes to a kind of self-awareness. It comes to the fore best when one tries to develop an appreciation of music and poetry. However, it is better to approach it from the other side. In the outer physical life, the sense has atrophied.

From there, it goes further and further to what we call today: the human being comes to the idea of the self. We must be honest about this idea of the self. People express the self and have a certain inner support in the expression. They rightly believe that they are grasping the self by expressing it. This is the case. It is a kind of preparation for grasping the real higher self. This realization is extremely difficult, otherwise all philosophical endeavor would not be directed towards it. In my “Philosophy of Freedom” I have endeavored to make clear how one can arrive at this. All this belongs to self-perception. One must inwardly grasp it, whereby one addresses oneself as I. We therefore have senses by which we grasp the outer world, and others by which we grasp ourselves when we hear the soundless sounding.

Here in the physical, the well-known five senses are particularly developed. These have no significance for the initiate in the spiritual world. The other senses, through which man comes to self-awareness, are atrophied. They have great significance for man when he passes through the gate of death.

The first sense needed in the beyond is the sense that passes from the external musical to the internal musical. For this sense, the presence of the external auditory tool is not a hindrance. Today only the sense through the ear is being killed. In the physical world, one can perceive the power of the sense when musicians compose. The sense stands behind the musical creation. After death, it becomes a sense through which the person is made aware of his entire surroundings. We then experience music inwardly. After death, the sense becomes an external sense and one perceives for a time after death what goes through the world, because the world is permeated by rhythmic-musical harmony. A person who would not perceive this rhythmic-musical harmony would be like a person in the physical world who could not perceive the inorganic.

In my book 'Theosophy', in the description of Devachan, you will find how mutual life consists in the unfolding of the musical-rhythmic harmony. Indeed, the upper and lower are joined by the forward and backward, while we only know that we are walking upright through the sense of balance. We perceive the beings that are above and below, right and left. So the inner senses, which are now atrophied, expand and convey the spiritual world to us. Then the sense of balance develops into a sense of harmony and rhythm, and the sense of movement is added. When we are liberated from the whole apparatus of muscles and tendons, the sense that is otherwise concentrated through the physical body will spread and we will come to the possibility of being everywhere in the universe as we are in our own body through the sense of movement. In the spiritual world, the outer world is as in the physical world a muscle movement takes place in us. When a hand is held out to a child, the child understands and imitates the movement. The sense of movement awakens in the inner experience of the imitated movement.

Over time, one is thoroughly cured of some teachings that always suffer from the fact that they say: We live in ourselves. But there is no blood circulation in the supersensible world.

The sense of inner movement will be a very important sense when we have died, the sense of life will be important to us – if it cannot be claimed in an unpleasant way – because then we will no longer have headaches and no feeling of hunger.

The senses that have been atrophied here are particularly stimulated when we pass through the gate of death. We cannot perceive our own corporeality through our own corporeality, the eye cannot see itself and the brain cannot examine itself; so the organ that perceives something cannot be the same as that which perceives itself. Thus, what we have called the meaning of life must be separated out from the physical, and so it approaches the soul. It is not the case with the sense of balance that it mediates perception; rather, it expresses itself only symbolically in it.

These senses are actually the ones that are selfish by their very nature, because it is through them that man perceives his self. And we must not hide from ourselves the fact that what we take with us out of life is the more selfish part. So first of all we keep the more selfish part, and from this it becomes understandable that immediately after death, man passes into a rather selfish state. Just as a child brings its senses with it into physical existence and must first get used to the physical sensual world, so too, in the disembodied state, the human being must get used to the supersensible world. This takes quite a long time after death, and while he is learning to get used to his senses, all that remains to him at first is merely what has brought him together with the outside world here in the physical world, as a memory, and specifically as the more unpleasant part of the memory. The first memory lasts only a few days; it appears as a memory tableau that we are familiar with. Then it begins to change so that what is at its innermost here is connected in an inward way, so that the person becomes accustomed to asserting himself inwardly over everything he has experienced, because the possibility of perceiving ceases.

A concrete example: In some relationship of life we have lived together with a person. We pass away, he remains behind on the physical plane. We become more and more accustomed to retaining something from the inner being other than the memory. When we look at a dead person, we see that he knows what we experienced with him during his life on earth. With death, the thread now breaks and now the harrowing realization can be made that one meets dead people who say with the means of communication: “I lived there with this or that person. I know that he lives on, but I only know something about him until I die. That is a great pain. Now the dead person misses him. That is why the dead mainly mourn those they loved and cannot reach out to. It must be admitted that we can provide important services to the dead in this regard if we reach out to them. The external senses are taken from the dead, only what they have experienced in common with us lives in them. Yes, ordinary life actually offers nothing that could change this. It can only be changed if bonds are formed between the dead and the living. It is usually the case for the dead that we look up to the dead. (Gap in the text.) Now there is a common link between the dead and the living: it is what we think of supersensory thoughts. Spiritual thinking is this connecting link. I may emphasize that one can read to the dead about what concerns the supersensible worlds. When we have time, we sit down and go through in thought what the content of spiritual science is and in doing so, we vividly imagine that the deceased are with us. We thus spare them the torment of thinking that we are not there. We have achieved very good results within the anthroposophical movement by reading to the dead in our thoughts. This brings them together with us, and that is what they need and long for. There are two aspects to living together with the dead. The first is what has just been characterized, the lack of the people with whom one lived on earth. We can remedy this by reading to them. We should be together with the dead and bridge the circumstances of our existence. What does it matter to the dead if we read anthroposophy to them, even though they did not want to know about it during their lifetime? — is often said. But that is a materialistic objection, because the circumstances do not remain the same. For example, we can observe that two brothers are there. One of them is drawn to spiritual science, while the other becomes more and more angry about it. He talks himself more and more into a rage. But he does this only because he wants to numb himself to his inner longing for spiritual science. It is not easy to reach him in life, and it is not good to agitate for anthroposophy. In death, what the person has longed for most becomes apparent, and it is precisely such souls that can be given the very best by reading to them. Those who were interested in anthroposophy here will become more and more interested in it there. This is one thing.

The other thing to consider, especially in our time, is that when we enter the supersensible world in our sleep every day, we are in the same realm as the dead. Only we no longer know anything about it after waking up. How do most people go to sleep now? It can be said that when they have crossed the threshold of sleep, they have taken little spirituality with them. Those who have attained the necessary heaviness through the consumption of alcoholic beverages do not bring much of a spiritual nature into the spiritual world. But there are many nuances. We often hear: Yes, what is the use of studying spiritual science if you still can't see into the spiritual worlds? — Yes, if you only study it enough, you will take something with you into your sleep. Imagine a sleeping city, sleeping people, so the souls are disembodied. That which the sleeping souls represent for the spiritual world is still something different than that which they represent for the physical world. It is something similar for the dead. What we give the dead and what they absorb into consciousness is what they need for their life. And when we bring them spiritual thoughts, then they have nourishment; when not, then they are hungry, so that the sentence may be expressed: We can, through our cultivation of spiritual thoughts here on Earth, provide nourishment for the dead. We can leave them hungry when we bring them no spiritual thoughts. When the fields become barren, then they bring forth no fruits for the nourishment of men, and men can starve. The dead, of course, cannot starve, they can only suffer when the spiritual life on earth becomes desolate.

The fact of the matter is that here on earth, science follows different laws about the interrelationships, and one ideal is that through science, life as such can be scientifically grasped. But here on the physical plane one does not get to know life. All laws do relate to the living, but one cannot explore life with all this knowledge. For the supersensible world, one cannot get to know death with all research. For him who sees through things, it is nonsensical to believe that there is a death in the supersensible world. There are sleep-like states of consciousness and also a longing for death, just as we would like to understand life, but there is no death there. One should not believe that one could perish in the spiritual world, one cannot die there either. One cannot destroy one's consciousness either, which corresponds to dying here. But one can become lonely in the spiritual world.

It is about not being able to perceive the physical-sensory world. One only knows about oneself and nothing about other beings. That is what is called the suffering and pains of Kamaloka. What broadens human consciousness is the social life after death, and we also come into contact with the various beings of the supernatural world in social life.

One objection that may still be raised is to be resolved this evening in Erfurt. It is this: What is it like, since the dead are in the supersensible world after all? Can they learn anything from our reading to them about the supersensible worlds? — They cannot learn in the supersensible world what we do not give them from the earth. The thoughts must flow up from the earth. Anthroposophy is not taught in heaven, but on earth. People are not on earth to get to know only a vale of tears, but also Anthroposophy. It is often believed that one can also get to know anthroposophy after death, but this is a great mistake. What a person has experienced on earth, he must put down in the spiritual world after he has crossed the gate of death.

Dear friends,

You have seen how necessary it is to relate a state of illness in a human being to his or her spiritual life and experience. The understanding that should be brought to illness by the two groups of people who have especially to do with pastoral medicine can really only come from such a point of view. Therefore I would like once more to consider the actual state of illness in connection with a person's spiritual life, this time from a standpoint that I think will throw greatest light upon the nature of illness.

As human beings we alternate between waking and sleeping. You all know in general what can be said from our perspective about these two conditions.

Today let us hold clearly in our minds what really happens in the human being during sleep. The physical body and etheric body are by themselves; the astral body and ego are also by themselves. Turning first to the physical and etheric bodies, we know that by virtue of what these bodies are, certain processes go on that during the person's sleep are independent of the activity of the astral body and ego. In the human organism we find processes going on that are not at all suited to it in the way they must play themselves out. The physical body has to do with physical processes. Physical processes take their course outside in the mineral kingdom; they are suited to the mineral kingdom. They are not at all suited to the constitution of the human physical body. And yet while it is asleep this human body is, so to speak, subject to these physical processes in the same way that the mineral kingdom is. We must be aware of this contradiction in the human being precisely during sleep. During sleep the human being ought to be a world of physically active forces and substances, but this is something that really cannot be. That is why processes that go on in the physical body during sleep—unless they are brought into balance—cause illness.

The general assertion that sleep is healthful is correct in a certain sense, but only under certain conditions. And it must not prevent us from examining the true situation without prejudice. Physical processes in the human physical body can only be healthful when the ego and astral organization are down in the physical body, as is the normal condition during waking life. It is constantly interrupted by the sleep condition. Normally, however, even during sleep the catabolic process is still always going on in the physical body; it must be there so that the soul-life and spiritual life as a whole can really unfold. For the spiritual life is not connected with anabolic processes, only with catabolic processes. During sleep, therefore, there must be just as much of the catabolic processes as a person needs for waking life to unfold the next morning. If too many catabolic processes are there because of some unhealthy sleep condition, a residue of these processes piles up in the human organism, and then we have the inner cause for an illness.

If we extend our investigation to the etheric body, we find that during sleep only the processes can take place in the etheric body that can otherwise take place in the plant kingdom. During daytime consciousness, when the astral body and ego are in the etheric body, these processes are always raised to a higher level. But from the moment of a person's going to sleep to the moment of waking, they take their course in the same way that they do in the plant kingdom. Thus they too are not suited to the human organism; they need to be balanced by the astral body and ego. If they create a residue, this too is cause for illness. So we can say that sleep can show us how causes of illness really originate in the human organism. For they are fundamentally the normal sleep processes; at the same time they are the basis for human soul-spiritual life. And that points to a secret of this world—that whenever one penetrates to reality, one finds it has two sides! On one side, in the sleep condition of the human physical and etheric bodies we find the basis for spiritual development; on the other side, in the very same processes we find the basis for illnesses. Thereby illness is brought into direct connection with human spiritual development. Thus if we study what is active during sleep in the human physical and etheric bodies, we find the fundamental causes of illness.

Now let us consider from this point of view those who during waking life do not go down deeply enough into their physical and etheric bodies—which is what we have found to be the case in the mentally retarded or the psychopath. With such people the soul and spirit enter into processes of illness and live with them. Special value should be laid on this knowledge, that psychopaths and the so-called mentally disturbed are always closely involved in their inner lives with the causes of illness. You see, one has to look at such things carefully.

But now let us go to the outer world. Let us start from the human physical body (Plate VI, left) and consider the outer mineral world that relates to it. During sleep we have processes in the human physical body from which the ego is missing. They go on without really any inner working “motor.” But there is ego out there in the world in all those mineral processes. In them is what we can call world-ego. So we have on the one hand within the processes of the human physical body a condition of non-ego, a sum of processes that are egoless, processes that lack ego. And we have on the other hand in our outer environment a sum of mineral processes and mineral substances that are permeated by ego—that means, by all the hierarchies who are to be identified with ego. Mineral substance has ego.

Therefore let us assume that we observe in some person's physical body a process that should not be there, a sick process. It lacks ego. What can we do if we want to cure this condition? We can search outside in the mineral kingdom for that part of the ego that the person lacks, to cure what is too much asleep, to cure what is still continuing to sleep during waking life. Then we have the right remedy. If you give the substance that has an affinity to the sick organ, the ego-force that the organ lacked is brought into the organ. This is the principle underlying our search in inorganic nature around us for medicinal remedies for the physical body of the sick person. We have to find the corresponding substance that has ego-force; then it has a healing effect. Thus the transition from pathology to therapy rests upon a correct insight into the relation between the processes of the human physical body and the outer mineral world on the one hand, and the relation of the human etheric body to the plant world on the other. If we observe too exuberant a growth in the etheric body, we realize that the etheric body is lacking proper penetration by the astral body. Then we must search in the plant kingdom for the proper corresponding remedy. This is the direction our work must take.

One must recognize the spirit in nature, the spirit that is in the mineral and plant kingdoms of the world. It is the spirit, not the substance, that one must know, because in reality one heals the human being through the spirit that is in the mineral and in the plant. In its nature substance is not truly governed by spirit, but even so it has spirit in it. And those who want to heal without recognizing the spirit in stones and plants can only grope their way through traditional theory. They can try one thing or another and see whether it helps, but they will never know why it helps—because they will never know just where the spirit is in possession of some mineral or how it is in possession of it. To be a healer requires first and foremost a spiritual outlook on the world. And indeed this is the greatest anomaly of our time: that it is medicine itself that has the frightful disease of materialism. Medicine is seriously ill with materialism. It has become blind and is falling asleep, and this is creating harmful soul substances in science. It really needs to be healed. One can indeed say, the sickest entity of our time is not Turkey,¹² as was the case in nineteenth-century Europe, but the medical profession. This is a fact that physicians should know—as well as the theologians, for then perhaps the secret will remain among those to whom it has been entrusted!

Let us look at these things more closely. There are certain persons who are not psychopathic or insane in the sense in which one is justified in using those terms, but who nevertheless illustrate what I have been talking about during the last few days. They descend into their physical and etheric bodies in such a way that they acquire a certain perceptible connection to their sick condition, to sick processes. These are sleepwalkers, whose peculiar state is not make-believe; it has often been described to the general public, and every initiate knows it well. While they are in their somnambulistic condition, they describe their illnesses. They go down into their physical and etheric body. Now the normal human being in waking life has the physical and etheric bodies completely saturated by the astral body and the ego. In the case of these sick individuals, the ego and astral body do not combine with the etheric and physical body in accordance (figuratively speaking) with their exact atomic weight. Some of the ego and astral body is left out; it has not entirely sunk down. But then it is this element that is able to perceive. Only that part of the ego and astral body perceives that has not sunk down into the etheric and physical body. When some of the astral body and ego is superfluous in such a person, then there is this inner perception, and the person can describe his or her own illness.

But now there is another condition—a condition of the opposite kind, in which the normal sleep condition is disturbed. In this case, when the ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric body and things happen in the ego and astral body that do not belong in this soul-spiritual entity (as the things I was just describing did not belong in that physical-etheric body), when too much spirit is experienced by the ego and astral body during sleep (as too much nature was experienced in the opposite condition by the physical-etheric body), then a clairvoyance comes about that borders on a pathological state. The individual carries into sleep a certain power to perceive spiritual things, then afterward carries back memories of spiritual perception into waking consciousness. In particular, these abnormal spiritual perceptions appear in lively dreams. And then, as every initiate knows, we observe that the dreams have the following content.

Suppose the sick person, the physically sick person, is in the former condition I was describing and dips down with the spirit and soul into the physical-etheric body and then experiences the illness in a somnambulistic condition. The sick person experiences a strong catabolic process going on in the physical-etheric body, a kind of reverse process of nature. But now suppose the person is outside the physical body with the astral body and ego. Then the person has experiences of the spiritual aspect of external nature. Suppose the person experiences a sick organ inwardly—sick because it allows some outer process to occur in an unhealthy way. This is experienced in the somnambulistic state, and the inner process is described. If the person is in the opposite condition, the somnambulism works into the ego and astral body when these are farther out of the physical and etheric body. If the spiritual, elemental life of nature comes into dreams, the person experiences what is spiritual in the minerals. And what does the person dream about? The person dreams of the medicinal remedy. Here you have the connection between many aspects of somnambulistic life. The somnambulist alternates between two conditions, as I have described. In one condition dreaming of the illness, in the other condition dreaming of the remedy. And generally speaking, that is the way pathology and therapy were explored in the old mysteries.

In those times there was not so much experimenting as there is today. The sick person was brought into the temple and put into a kind of somnambulistic condition by trained temple priests. This condition was increased to the level at which the sick person could describe the process of the illness. Then the opposite somnambulistic condition was brought about, and the temple priest was told the dream that contained the therapy. This was the manner of inquiry in the oldest mysteries; it led from disease to cure. And so it was that medical science was cultivated in olden times, by seeking knowledge of humanity through the human being itself.

We don't have to go back to those old methods. We have to move forward to methods by which we are able to follow the course of an illness through imaginative experience, and by which we are able to experience the healing process through an intuitive activity that leads not into the human being, but outward. What has formerly been a kind of experimentation in this field will now have to become careful observation. You see the direction in which we are turning. In olden times external physical science was a purely observing science; then it began to experiment and more and more substituted experiment for pure observation. That was right. But medical science did the same thing in imitation, and that was not right. It experimented on human beings with the temple research. We must find the way to change over from experimenting to observing, to an observation of life that is sustained by spiritual knowledge and enriched by scientific research. For whoever really looks at life can catch a view of illness everywhere. In the simplest form of everyday life that has deviated only to the slightest degree from so-called normal, something can be seen that will lead—if considered properly—to a recognition of complicated disease processes. One has only to understand how things relate to one another.

But this shows us that physicians must more and more become really practical individuals—again, the exact opposite of what recent materialistic development has made them. They have gradually become pure scientists. And that makes no sense. A physician should always be able to cope with natural laws in a living way, and not just know them abstractly. With abstract knowledge of them one has not yet even begun to work with them. That's the situation from one side.

Let us look at the other side, the side that the priest must see. We think of the priest's mission as guiding human beings in their approach to the spiritual world, in everything that will help their ego and astral body to find their way in the spiritual world. If it is the physician's task to inquire into the nature of humanity from a spiritual point of view, to explore pathological conditions from a spiritual point of view, then what must the priest look for? The priest has to find what can lead human beings toward the spiritual world; their attitude toward the spiritual world, whether they love the spiritual world, how much they are permeated by the spiritual world—insofar as these things are apparent in normal life. The priest must deal with all the normal or abnormal symptoms that the human soul manifests in this regard in everyday life. For the priest we have to point out the opposite course to that of the physician. We told the physician that if somnambulists are allowed to describe their sick organ, they will also describe the medicinal remedy for it from out of their dreams.

Let us look again at the priests in the ancient mysteries. They were not primarily interested in discovering medicinal remedies, although of course they were intensely interested in healing, for they were first and foremost a friend of humanity. But they did not stop at healing; they were interested in more than that. They were interested in the following: They saw that the somnambulist found his or her own remedy in dreams while in the spiritual world with the ego and astral body. The priests paid particular attention to this soul while it was in the spiritual world, and followed it back again into the body. And what was found? Of course they found themselves again confronting the sick organ. But now, from what they had perceived of that soul while it was out of the body, they knew how the astral body and ego would work in this organ if it were healthy. Upon returning again to the sick organ, they knew what the situation would be under healthy conditions. Now they realized how the astral body and ego out of their divine-spiritual powers take hold normally in the human organism, how they sit normally within it. The priests learned to know them in their healthy normality through the dreams in the spiritual world, and learned how they relate to the physical world when they descend into the physical body. From this, the priests learned to know the inner relation of humanity to the spiritual world.

This knowledge should influence priests as they enact the sacrament in which they are carrying back the spiritual world. For the spiritual world is present in the sacrament through the establishment of the ritual. The ritual unites spirit with physical substance by virtue of deep insight into the relation of spirit to matter. Inspirited physical substance is led back into human beings, and the relation is established in them that unites their astral body and ego within their physical and etheric bodies with the divine-spiritual being of the world. Everything in this relation depends upon the priest's celebrating the sacraments with such an attitude. Everything depends upon our permeating ourselves with such thoughts. For instance, the relation between experience in the body and experience out of the body; secrets of pathology from observing the body when it is left; secrets of therapy from observing abnormal life in the spiritual world as compared to normal perception in the spiritual world. What was established in ancient times in secret temple procedures by prominent somnambulists must now be again established by human beings developing spiritual perception in themselves and observing the connections. In this area, experiment must give way to observation.

Now it is important that the physicians and priests in the anthroposophical movement are already united in their knowledge of such facts as these. That is what really binds us together. We are permeated by a different kind of knowledge from what others have. By contrast, the idea that some sort of union or association or group should be formed is just an abstraction. What really binds us together is the possession of certain knowledge. Those who possess this knowledge obviously belong together, and should feel closely united to one another. Any external association should be an expression of the inner union created by this knowledge.

Our time suffers very much in this respect. For instance, often when I speak today to, say, a youth gathering, even though I fully appreciate their endeavor and even though I myself have the very best intentions, it is extraordinarily difficult to experience their response to the concrete truths that should be filling their souls. It is difficult when I hear them say, “The first thing we must do is to join together!” Well, indeed, everything in these last decades has been “joined together”—ad infinitum! People have gone on and on joining together, but they've never yet got anything real for a result by tacking zeros onto one another indefinitely—00000000 and so on. One empty consciousness to begin with, joined to another empty consciousness, joined to a third consciousness, again empty—that all adds up to nothing. By contrast, you only have to assume a content—a content that is, after all, the basis of all zeroes: one. Then you have something. It doesn't have to be a human being, but it has to be some genuine content. Interestingly enough, this assumes that there is something there to begin with. It doesn't even have to be a human being. It can be real, living knowledge. These are things we should think about in our time. For usually people are much too comfortable to search for the concrete; they are content simply to put abstractions together. Joining together is all right, of course, but it will come of itself if something concrete is there first.

Perhaps this is something that should be understood before anything else by those who work among modern humankind as physicians and priests. Today two conditions can be observed throughout the world. Generally speaking, our ego and astral body do not find properly our physical and etheric bodies, whatever our waking condition may be. Also, truly, for those observing the world as it evolves, materialistic views don't really worry them unduly! Let the monists and the others fight with one another. Nothing is accomplished thereby. But that is certainly not the fundamental evil in the evolution of humanity. If one is observing the evolutionary process, one is not particularly interested to participate in these discussions of worldviews. For actually, whether one thinks this or another thinks that, opinions are frightfully thin little things in the human soul! They're just bubbles in the reality of this world. If one bubble hits another, if one bursts, if another becomes a bit thicker from the bursting of another, none of it matters. What does matter, what should be clearly realized, is that one does not ever becomes a materialist if one is sitting with one's ego and astral body properly in the physical and etheric bodies. In other words, to be a materialist means in a finer sense to be ill. One must fill one's whole being with this knowledge. And it is not surprising in the least that when others, those who are sitting properly inside their physical and etheric bodies, encounter the sick materialists, they turn away to exactly the opposite pole—to all the vague mist of spiritualism.

Here we come to a difficult area, because these things do not take place in those parts of the world that still have a connection with one another; they happen where the world has been thrown into chaos and its pieces lie scattered about. One thing no longer reveals itself as a healing remedy for another, for they are falling away from each other. So long as sick people speak of what is going on in their organs, their dreams will still reveal the corresponding healing remedies in the outer world. But in our present time people who are ill from materialism will not be describing sick inner organs; they have broken free of their organism; they want to describe the external world, as a materialist naturally would. Then they find not remedial dreams but the opposite—false spiritualism, which is certainly not a remedy. On the contrary, it brings on the illness more strongly than ever.

And so we find today in our time—if I may draw an analogy between medical work for individuals and cultural pathology and therapy—we find that spiritualism does not by any means offer a remedy for materialism, but corresponds to the somnambulist's dream revealing his sick organs. Now sometimes a process that properly should have taken hold of a person's inner organism pushes through the organism to the periphery, to the outer world; there is then the pathological condition called a “rash.” This corresponds exactly to what I've been telling you about. One sees with one's own eyes that what had been inside and is now outside is nothing healthy. It is an aberration. The physician should see clearly that materialism is a rash and needs to be regarded as a medical problem.

This will build a bridge to the priest's observation on the other side. The priest sees the symptoms that rise out of sick human souls, out of their need, out of their feelings. Spiritualism is just such a symptom. One comes to realize that in the widest sense sick life wants to sink down into the world, that all the disease in the present world outlook does indeed work itself out fully—insofar as it rests on the will—by working into people and sickening their inner life.

In the present epoch of human evolution it is impossible to see something that could be seen clearly in former times, because people in those days had different characteristics. We cannot see how a false direction of the will, a false worldview, a false view of life—all of which were designated in olden times as sin—cause illness in the organism. For they do not do so immediately in the ordinary way. We are only aware of the connection in the rarest cases, cases that are an intermediate stage between the sin and what can obviously be diagnosed as the resulting illness. These intermediate stages may simply develop into morbid conditions. But in this modern epoch the sin and the real illness are so detached from each other that now they even occur in separate incarnations. In earlier epochs they were able to appear in close connection as cause and effect, but as humanity developed they became separated so that sin appeared in one incarnation, illness in a subsequent one.

Here, then, begins the domain of the priests. Priests may no longer merely continue traditions of olden times, speaking of sin as the cause of illness. But if they have knowledge of repeated earth lives, they can speak of sin from that point of view; then they will again be speaking from the standpoint of truth. Much that priests in the world today say about these things is no longer true; it no longer corresponds to fact. These teachings originated in olden times, and today no one is interested in changing the teachings to accord with what is demanded in our time.

We have to relate ourselves to all this. Then it will be possible to make our study of pastoral medicine fruitful in both directions.

My intention is to give two more lectures for this course: tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. I am announcing this now so that you can make your plans accordingly.

• 12. “The sickest entity ...” This refers to a European expression, “the sick man of Europe,” applied to the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century.

An Introduction to the Winter's Lectures, 1918

I need not tell you what pleasure it gives me to be with you again at this difficult time so full of trials. As this is the first occasion for a long time that we have had the opportunity of discussing subjects connected with spiritual science, it is obvious that we should call to mind that spiritual science is far from being merely a theory, rather should it be a firm and substantial support, uniting the souls of men; not only the souls of those living here on the physical plane, but also the souls of those living in the spiritual world. This is a question we have very much at heart at the present time when innumerable souls have left the physical plane under circumstances to which we have often alluded, a time when so many are being subjected to the severest trials perhaps ever inflicted on man in the whole history of the world. Besides all the usual ideas which flow through our souls at the beginning of these lectures here and elsewhere, we will to-day try individually to direct our sentiments and feelings to those who are outside, as well as to those who, in consequence of these events have passed through the portals of death.

‘Ye who watch o'er souls on earth,
Ye who weave in souls on earth,
Ye Spirit-guardians of the souls of men
Working lovingly in Cosmic wisdom,
Hear ye our request
Look upon our love
Which with your helping, strengthening rays
Would fain unite
In spiritual devotion, sending forth our love.’

With reference to those too who have passed through the portal of death.

‘Ye who weave in the souls now in the spheres,
Ye spirit-guardians of the souls of men,
Working lovingly in Cosmic Wisdom,
Hear ye our request;
Look upon our love
Which with your helpful, strengthening rays
Would fain unite
In spiritual devotion, sending forth our love.’

May that spirit Whom we have sought to approach by means of the spiritual science we have striven to acquire, He who willed to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha for the salvation of the Earth, and for the freedom and progress of humanity, may He be with you in your heavy tasks.

The severe time of trial through which humanity is now passing may perhaps be one which will bring home to us more and more closely the significance of a spiritual deepening of the human soul. If so it will not have been in vain for the present and future of humanity; but the feeling arises that the time has not yet come, that mankind has not yet learnt lessons enough from the seriousness of the events of the present time. This is not said by way of criticism, but to appeal to right and true feeling. One feels that the Spirit of the Age must speak more and more distinctly to human hearts and souls; for not only do human voices speak to-day, other voices are heard too, ringing forth mysteriously from weighty and significant events as well as from other sources.

I shall endeavour to put before you to-day what has particularly struck me during my recent journey through Switzerland, with respect to the relation of our spiritual movement to the tasks of the age. Anyone who has carefully studied the course of lectures I gave in Vienna before the war, on the experiences of human beings between death and rebirth, and what I said with respect to human life as a whole, will know that reference was being made—before the war—to the deeper causes, the deeper-lying foundations of what has lately worked out in the terrible events of the times. We may say that everything that can be experienced below the surface then, is to-day externally revealed as living proof of the correctness of what was said at that time. The universal disease of the age was then unequivocally described, as you know, as a social cancer. Here and there it can be seen that some few lessons have been learnt from the great events that have occurred; but on the other hand, it is clearly evident, particularly when apparently insignificant things are taken together, how rigid human thought has become on the physical plane during the last few centuries, and how slow men are to arrive at decisions of any weight. By way of introduction I should like to tell you some of my experiences during my Swiss tour, for it seems to me necessary that those who are interested in our Movement should form some idea of its connection as a whole. I shall only give a few points.

It must be regarded as a very satisfactory sign that during my recent stay in Switzerland a number of young students from the High School at Zurich desired a course of lectures referring to and combining the various branches of academic science. I therefore gave four lectures in Zurich; the first of which referred to the relation of our anthroposophical spiritual science to Psychology, the science of the soul; the second referred to the relation of spiritual science to History; the third referred to its relation to Natural Science, and the fourth to its relation to Social Science, to the great social and judicial problems of the people in our day. Though far from being all that we might wish, one cannot but see that a certain interest was shown in this drawing together of the threads of academical sciences. It was evident that these latter were awaiting completion, as one might say awaiting that which can only come from anthroposophical spiritual science, and that the part-sciences of the present day will remain but half or even quarter sciences, unless they can have that completion. Wherever I was allowed to give lectures in Switzerland I did not fail to let it be seen what it is that is lacking in this respect, and what it is our age must acquire for these tendencies to be guided in the right direction. One may say that although at first there was in Switzerland a strong opposition to our endeavours—and certainly this opposition is not growing less but rather increasing—yet side by side with this a lively interest is developing; and it may well be that karma has placed our building in Switzerland because the work may have a special significance for that land; particularly if our work is directed, as I hope it will be, in such a way that our activity will also bear witness to the sources of spiritual scientific investigation, which, alas, are in many respects disregarded and unnoticed in the spiritual life of Germany. That is a feeling which, while on the one hand it stirs one to-day with a certain tragic feeling of sorrow, yet, on the other, fills one with deep satisfaction. We may say that anyone who takes into consideration the fact that in four-fifths of the world the spiritual life, of which Germany is so proud, is to-day much calumniated and really abused, and if he seriously considers the gravity of this fact, as is not always done, while on the one hand he may feel sorrowful, yet on the other he may feel satisfaction in the hope that anthroposophical science may yet render it possible for the German spiritual life to make its voice heard in the other world—as it must, if the development of the world is not to be injured. A way can be found to speak to all men, no matter what their nationality, if one speaks to them in the true meaning of the word, of the spirit, that is, of the true sources of spiritual life.

It may strike a sorrowful note, too, that while the efforts made by spiritual science are successful in winning a little ground in some places, such a country as Switzerland is finding it increasingly difficult to stand up against the attacks made to-day. It is no easy matter in the face of the pressure exercised by four-fifths of the world, to form an impartial opinion; nor indeed is it easy to find the right words in which to say all that must be said, in a country in which, although neutral itself, those four-fifths of the world still play an important part. This has now reached a very acute crisis.

One great advantage to us in that country is that the mere words and teaching are there supported by the forms and creations of our building at Dornach, which place before the outer vision what it is that our spiritual science desires, and how it is able to show that when allowed to intervene in practical life and not crudely rejected, it is capable both of mastering and utilizing life, which at the present time makes such great demands on humanity.

In speaking to-day of the relation between the Spiritual Science of anthroposophy and other knowledge and wants of the world, it is really necessary to place quite new and unaccustomed ideas before one's hearers. In the profoundest depths of their consciousness people are dimly convinced that something new must come from somewhere or other. They are, however, extremely rigid as regards thinking, extremely slow to take in new ideas. Indeed it is a characteristic feature of our age that while life is lived at so rapid a pace, people are so dreadfully slow in thinking. We come across this in the smallest things. For instance, the threads of anthroposophical science were drawn towards the academical sciences in Zurich, although I had spoken publicly in Basel before I did so in Zurich. Just before I had to leave Switzerland, a request came from Basel, asking me to speak in an academical assembly on the relation of anthroposophical Spiritual Science to the other sciences. It was then, of course, too late to do so; the subject could not then be discussed. I mention this for two reasons: First because it would have been of great importance to speak of Spiritual Science in a hall dedicated to academical science and established by the students of Basel; and secondly because those people were so slow as to come to a conclusion only at the eleventh hour. That is characteristic, for elasticity of thought, capacity for quick decision might have brought about an earlier decision. It is necessary to discuss these things among ourselves, so that we may behave accordingly. To-day I need only refer to one of the subjects of which I have been speaking lately, to make clear the significance of what has to come about.

In Zurich I spoke, among other things, of the threads that can unite anthroposophical Spiritual Science and the science of history, the historical life of man. We to-day possess a history, which is taught to children and in college; but what is this history of ours? It is something which has not the remotest idea of the forces governing the historical life of mankind, for the simple reason that the whole object of the intellectual life of the present day is to set man's intelligence in motion, to set the ordinary so-called fully conscious concepts and ideas going, and with the help of these, to understand all things. External perceptible nature can certainly be understood by these means, so too can that thought which has triumphed in the domain of natural science; but if this mode of thought is applied to history, that means making history a natural science. Endeavours were being made in the nineteenth century to regard history in the same way as natural science regards the things perceptible to the senses. This, however, is not possible—for the simple reason that the facts of history are quite differently related to life. What is it that we meet in historical life? What are the impulses at work in history?

Anyone who believes that historical impulses can be grasped by means of the intellect, which can very well serve us in natural science, will never discover the historical impulses; for these work in human evolution in a similar way to the dreams in our own dream-life. They do not enter the ordinary consciousness which we use in everyday life or in natural science; but these impulses work like that which only plays into our dream-life. We may say: Historical becoming is a great dream of mankind, but what plays into our dreams like transient pictures becomes clear and distinct in the imaginations of spiritual science. Therefore there is no history which is not a spiritual science, and the history taught to-day is not history at all.

Hermann Grimm was struck with the fact that the historian, Gibbon, in describing the early days of the Christian era, describes the fall of the Roman Empire, but not the gradual ascent of Christianity, its growth and prosperity.

Of course he did not know the reason why a good historian can always describe a decline, but not a growth and a becoming. The reason is that the present-day method of learning history can only lead to an understanding of what is declining, not of what is growing. Growth plays a like part in the development of mankind as do dreams in the life of man; it can therefore only be described by a person able to have Imaginations. If a man does not possess this power, even though he be a Ranke or a Lamprecht, he can only depict the corpse of history, not the reality of its growth. The impulses of historical growth only enter our consciousness in dreams; if the ordinary consciousness tries to grasp the historical, it can only do so when the historical has already passed into the subconsciousness. Modern times present interesting examples of this. If we follow these up, we see how in the last few decades, interest in the great questions of the world as one coherent whole has practically died out—or become mere pedantry, which is almost the same thing. There is a deep connection between the pedantry of the age and the fact that a schoolmaster, at present at the head of the greatest republic, wants to lay down the law to mankind. If we ask ourselves: Where, during the last few decades, has there been a feeling for a great drawing together of mankind, for ideas having almost a religious character although of a crude kind, when everything else was more or less moribund? The answer, if we look the circumstances in the face, must be: in socialism. Ideas were there, but such as never tended to a spiritual life, only to a crude material life and alas, these ideas encountered no other world of ideas to stand against them. If we really understood the ideas which have come to the surface in socialism, we should find that they are in a sense historical ideas, dreams of humanity;—but what kind of dreams? One must have a feeling for this ‘being dreamt’ of the historical events of humanity. I tried to make this clear to the people in Switzerland by saying: If one seeks as leading and guiding personalities only those who are very clever but are without any understanding whatever for what I call dream impulses, it will be seen how far this leads. In this respect one should try to answer practically the question: How quickly can a commonwealth be systematically ruined? Contrive to set up therein a parliament of scholars! They need not be skilled professors, they might even be socialistic leaders;—in that movement there are professors enough. With a perception for such things, one will ask oneself: How has the whole comprehensive theory of socialism come about? If it could really be put into practice, it could only bring about ruin (and perhaps a sorrowful proof of this may yet be found in the East, if it does not stop, but tries to proceed with it further). How has it come about that these socialistic ideas have taken root in men's minds? What exactly are these theories?

To know this, one must be acquainted with the history of the last four centuries, especially that of the 18th and 19th. One must know that real history is very different from that contained in history books; one must know that such books, especially in regard to the last two centuries form a picture of human class and social contention; Karl Marx, for instance, has simply set up as theories what humanity dreamt in those centuries, something which actually did exist, but which, like a dream, ceased in the new period and gave place to theories. The theories of socialism which arose as soon as the fact of it was lost in dream, show that the intellect uses what has already perished, what has already become a corpse, directly it takes the matter in hand with such means of knowledge as are quite valid—e.g., in natural science. From such cognitions one must see that the world really stands at a turning point in time where the comprehension of the historical development (for the present has also become historical, and as man lives into the future he also experiences historical development) must be understood in the sense of Spiritual Science. One does not obtain a true picture of even the most recent events if Spiritual Science is left out of account. I shall relate an oft-quoted example.

(Among ourselves as members such matters may be discussed; though people outside often laugh at such things—they will not always do so however). An important incident of European life in the Middle Ages is the fact that at that time the knowledge of the Western quarter of the globe was lost to Europe. There was indeed always an inner connection, especially between Ireland and England, and the territory now called America. A certain connection was always kept up between Europe and the West, and only in the century following the “discovery of America,” intercourse with that continent was forbidden by a Papal document (of course it was not called ‘America’ then). This connection with America only ceased with its so-called ‘discovery’ by a Spaniard, but outer history is so inaccurate that people are under the impression that in Europe America was not known at all before the year 1492. Almost everyone believes this. Many similar facts can be brought forward which Spiritual Science has to make valid from its own sources. We are standing at a turning point in time when historical life must be considered from the aspect of Spiritual Science.

Someone might ask: If Spiritual Science as we understand it can only unfold in our time, how then was it in earlier times?

When we look back into earlier times, we find something different, something comparable with what in Spiritual Science is called Imaginations; we find myths and legends, and from their forces, which were pictures, impulses could be derived; even political impulses, which were more real, more in accordance with facts, than the abstract teaching of modern history, social economy, and so forth. It is not necessary to understand in abstract ideas what holds people together and makes the conditions of communal life. In earlier times this was brought to expression in myths. We to-day can no longer produce myths; we must come to Imaginations, and with these comprehend historical life, and from that again coin political impulses which will be truly different from the fantastic impulses of which so many dream to-day, which are, as we might say, impulses of the schoolmaster.

It is certainly very difficult to tell people that historical life is something which, as regards the ordinary ideas, runs its course in the subconsciousness; but on the other hand, this hidden life of mankind knocks at the door of events, at the door indeed of all human impulses. It may be said—as the Zurich lectures have shown—that everywhere to-day one would like to meet this pursuit of knowledge, which also aims at the spirit, though with wholly inadequate means. In Zurich we made acquaintance with psycho-analysis, the analytical psychology, already qualified as academical; and, connected with those very lectures, the most remarkable discussions have taken place on psycho-analysis in relation to anthroposophical Spiritual Science. The psycho-analyst, however, comes to the world of Spiritual Science spiritually blindfold, and can find nothing in it. Yet this world raps at the door which ought now to be opened to man.

In Zurich there is a professor named Jung, who has quite recently written another pamphlet on psycho-analysis and the many problems connected with it. He is the author of many works on the subject: he shows, however, that he can only lay hold of it with inadequate means. One fact will show what is meant. Jung brings forward an example cited by the greater number of psychoanalysts.

The following happened to a woman. She was invited to an evening party. As soon as supper was over, her hostess, not being very well, was to start for one of the spas. Supper came to an end and the hostess started, the guests leaving with her. They walked, as people sometimes do on leaving an evening party, not on the pavement, but in the middle of the road. Presently a cab came round the corner. The guests all beat a retreat to the pavement, except the lady of the story, who ran to the middle of the road just in front of the horse; the driver shouted at her, but she ran on until she came to a bridge across a river. Then, in order to escape from this unpleasant situation, she decided to throw herself from the bridge into the river. This she did, and was rescued by the guests, who ran after her, and the house where the party had been held being the nearest, she was taken back there. She met there her hostess's husband and spent a few hours with him.

Let us reflect what a man with insufficient data can make of such an occurrence. If he approaches the matter with the methods of the psycho-analyst, he discovers those mysterious provinces in the soul which tell us that this soul, in the seventh year of her life, had an experience with horses, so that the sight of the cab horses called up an earlier experience from her subconsciousness and so bewildered the lady that she did not spring to the side but ran on before the cab. Thus to the psycho-analyst, the whole transaction is the result of the connection of a present experience with ‘unsolved riddles of the soul,’ from the domain of education, and so forth. This is a pursuit of the subject with inadequate means, because the psycho-analyst does not know that the subconscious ruling in man has more real existence than is supposed; it is also much more subtle and much more clever than anything man gets from his conscious intellect. This subconsciousness is often much braver and more determined. The psycho-analyst does not know that a ‘daimon’ dwelt in the soul of this lady who started out, from the first, with the unconscious intention of being alone with the husband after his wife had started on her journey. This was all arranged in the most subtle manner by the subconsciousness, for one does everything with far greater certainty if the consciousness has nothing to do with it. The lady ran before the horse simply in order to be intercepted when matters had reached a certain point; and she conducted herself to that end. Into these things the psycho-analyst does not penetrate because he does not suppose that there is a spiritual psychic world everywhere, to which the human soul stands in relation. Jung, however, has some inkling of this. From innumerable things that appear before him, he divines that the human soul stands in relation to numberless others. Still he must remain a materialist, or cease to be one of the clever men of the day. What then does he do? He says that the human soul stands everywhere in connection with spiritual facts outside itself (this is shown, he said, by the things which take place within), it is in connection with super-psychic, spiritual facts. But as a materialist he cannot admit the existence of these facts and therefore falls back upon the following theory:—The soul has a body, derived from other bodies which again are derived from others. Then there is heredity, and Jung construes that the soul in accordance with that conforms to all that has been experienced in relation to the heathen Gods, for instance. Through inheritance these experiences remain in the soul, creating an ‘isolated province of the soul,’ which only needs to be questioned if man desires to be rid of it. Jung even conceives that it is necessary for the human soul to have connection with this isolated province, and that it ruins the nervous system if it is not drawn up into the consciousness. Therefore he enunciates the proposition, which is quite justifiable according to the modern philosophy of life; that unless the soul is in relation to a divine being, it must inwardly perish. He is just as sure of this as he is that there is no divine being at all. The question of the relation of the human soul to God has not the least connection with the question of the existence of God in his mind.

So it is written in his book. Let us think what is really under consideration. It is scientifically proved that the human soul must construct a relation to God, but it is equally certain that it would be foolish to assume the existence of a God. Thus the soul for its own health is condemned to invent a God for itself. Pretend that there is a God, or thou wilt be ill! That is actually stated in the book.

We see from this what great enigmatic problems knock at the door, and how the present time opposes these things. If men were courageous enough, this truth would gradually come to be perceived to-day, but they are not so courageous. I do not say all this in hostility to Jung, for I believe he is more courageous in his thinking than all the others. He says what he has to say according to the assumptions of the present. Others do not say it; they have less courage.

We must reflect on all these things in order to understand the real meaning of the statement, ‘Spiritual science brings forward a truth such as: What takes place in the historical life of man, and consequently in the life of political impulses, has nothing to do with the ordinary consciousness, it can have nothing to do with it; but can only be understood and applied through imaginative consciousness.’ We might even say as regards the most distinctive representatives of the anti-social historic conception, that President Wilson's view must be replaced by an imaginative knowledge of the truth. And Wilson's ideas are very widespread (far more people are of his way of thinking than is supposed). Names are of no moment, only the facts under which men live are of consequence. I may be allowed to be somewhat outspoken about Wilson, because in the course of lectures given in Helsingfors before the war, already then I pronounced my judgment of him and did not need to wait for the war to learn of what spirit he is who sits on the throne of America. At that time fulsome praise of Woodrow Wilson could be heard everywhere; it has not long ceased. The world is now very much wiser, and knows that the man who now occupies the throne of America drafted his most powerful republican document from one issued by the late Emperor of Brazil, Don Pedro, in 1864. Wilson copied this exactly except that the passage, ‘I must intervene in the interests of South America’ is altered to ‘I must intervene in the interests of the United States of America,’ etc., with the necessary recasting.

When in their time Wilson's two books, The New Freedom and Mere Literature appeared in our own country, there was no less fulsome praise. This was only about five or six years ago. In this matter of Wilson's influence people have certainly learned a few things; but as regards many other things they could only be learnt from the incisive events of the present time. For this reason it is necessary that many things which can only flourish on the ground of spiritual scientific cognition, should be taken very earnestly. People lightly reproach anthroposophical Spiritual Science as being merely ‘theoretical;’ and concerning itself with cosmic evolution rather than with love. They do not see that cosmic evolution is the expression of love, but prefer to talk of ‘love,’ of universal love, of how and what man should love, and they have been talking thus thousands of years. Many do not understand that at the present time the fruition of love is to be comprehended through the study of cosmic evolution. Let us for a few moments allow Spiritual Science to take hold of the human soul, and we shall see how love will arise in the human heart. Love cannot be preached; it grows if properly cultivated; it is a child of the spirit. Even among men it is a child of true knowledge—knowledge reaching to the spirit, not to matter only.

In this introductory lecture I have wished to do no more than indicate a few perceptions which will be very significant at this period. All that can awaken power, courage, and hope in the human soul is to be reviewed in these lectures, and I should like especially to speak of all the gifts mankind can receive from Spiritual Science, other than those which have been given during past centuries. I should like to speak of Spiritual Science as something living, as something which is no theory, but which brings to birth in us a second man, a spiritual man who bears and maintains the other in the world. I believe above all that the, present time needs this. There was a time, in the Middle Ages, when many had a fantastic longing to make gold. Why did they wish to make gold? They wanted something which may not be realised under ordinary earthly conditions. Why? Because they perceived that ordinary earthly conditions, unless spiritualised and permeated by spiritual impulses, cannot give man any true satisfaction. In the end that is the content of the teaching of the Gospels also, only people usually overlook the most important points; they criticise the view of the Gospels that the Kingdom of God has come; yet is it not present? It is, but not to outward appearances. It must be understood inwardly. It must not be denied, as is done in our time. We shall speak of this descent of the Kingdom of the Spirit in our next lecture.

To-day I only wished to strike the keynote. Our epoch is directed to build the bridge to the kingdom in which the dead are living. The number of those now passed through the gate of death can be reckoned by millions. They live among us and we can find them. The way in which we can find them will be discussed from another point of view.

Good morning, gentlemen! Today, too, I will have to continue with what we have discussed, because the reason is that the matter can only be fully understood if one penetrates further and further into it.

You see, it depends on the human being, as you have seen, that he takes his nourishment from the earth, thereby feeding himself – that he takes care of his breathing from what surrounds the earth, from the air, only through this does he actually come to life, only through this is he able to become a sentient and feeling being -, and as we have seen, he takes forces from the whole world, only through this does he become a thinking being and only through this does he actually become a complete human.

So man must be able to nourish himself, man must be able to breathe, thereby becoming a sentient being - and he must be able to take the forces from the universe to thereby become a thinking being. He does not become a thinking being by himself, just as he cannot speak by himself. Man cannot think himself, just as he cannot eat himself.

Now let us take a closer look at how these things actually happen. Let us begin by clarifying how this process actually occurs when we absorb nutrients, have them in a dead state, so to speak, within our intestinal organism, and then they are revived again by the lymph glands and transferred by the lymph into the blood, the blood is renewed through breathing. The blood, or rather the force of the blood, the breath, then rises through the spinal cord into the brain and connects there with that which is brain activity.

You only have to consider how a child's nutrition differs from that of an adult to gain a great deal of insight into the human being as a whole. As you know, a child must drink a lot of milk in the very earliest period of life. At first, it feeds exclusively on milk. What does it actually mean for a child to feed exclusively on milk? We can visualize this if we consider what milk actually consists of.

Milk consists of 87 percent water. So when we drink milk as children, we actually drink 87 percent water, and only the last 13 percent is something else. Of these last 13 percent, only 4 percent is protein; 4 percent is fat in milk, and then there are some residual other substances, salts and so on. But essentially, that is what the child absorbs with the milk. So it is actually mainly water that it absorbs.

Now I have already told you that a human being consists mainly of fluid. The child must always increase this fluid. It must grow and therefore needs a great deal of water, which it takes in with the milk.

You may say: It would be the same if we gave the child only this 13 percent nutrition and the rest as water. Yes, you see, the human body is not designed for that. What we get with milk is not 13 ordinary percent of protein and fat and so on, but all of that, protein and fat, is dissolved in milk, dissolved in water, if it is milk. So it is the case that when the child drinks the milk, it gets the substances it needs in a dissolved state. And that is different from when the body first has to do the work that occurs during dissolution.

If you recall what I have already said about nutrition, you will say: we also have to dissolve the nutrients that we take in through our mouths first. We actually only have permission from nature to get solid nutrients into our mouths; then we dissolve them with our own fluids. The rest of the body, stomach, intestines and so on, can only use what has been dissolved. The child must first acquire this ability to dissolve; it must first develop it. So it cannot do it itself from the beginning. So it is dissolved beforehand. You can see this best from the fact that if a child is fed too much with any artificial food that is composed, it will still stunted.

Now you might say: What if I could create artificial milk after all, what if I could combine the 13 percent of protein, fat and so on contained in water with the water in such a way that it would be similar to milk on the outside, would that be a milk that would be just as good for the child as the milk it usually gets? Yes, you see, gentlemen, that is simply not the case. The child would waste away if it were given such artificial milk. And since people can only produce according to need, we will also have to refrain from producing such milk. It would be a means of corrupting humanity.

For who can supply, as a solvent, what the child needs? You see, only life itself can do that. Animals could do it in a makeshift way, but not all animals. But for the very early days, when the child depends on it – because it cannot yet dissolve properly itself – these nutrients, protein and fat, can only be properly digested if they are already properly dissolved, and the child can only be properly nourished with human milk itself.

And of other milks, donkey milk is the one most similar to human milk, and so, if there is no way to feed the child through self-breastfeeding or breastfeeding at all, the child can still be fed to the greatest extent with donkey milk. This is admittedly very strange, but donkey's milk is actually most similar to human milk, so that if the right human breast cannot be provided, then in a pinch, breastfeeding could also be provided by keeping a donkey and a she-donkey and in this way providing the child with milk. But of course this is only something I say as a hypothesis, so that you can see how things are connected in nature.

If you now compare milk, for example, with the chicken egg as food, you will find that the chicken egg contains about 14 percent protein, which is actually four times more than what milk contains. If we begin to give the child food containing more albumen, then the child must already have the power of dissolving. It must already be able to dissolve.

You can see from this how necessary it is for the child to receive liquid nourishment. But what kind of liquid nourishment? A liquid nourishment that has already passed through life and, since the child is nursed directly at the mother's breast, is still alive.

In the case of a child, it can be clearly seen that when it drinks milk and the milk passes through the mouth and oesophagus into the stomach – only then is it killed in the human body – that it can then be revitalized in the intestines. So we see directly from the child that the life must first be killed. And because the life is still little changed, the child needs less strength to revive when it drinks milk than when it enjoys something else. So you see how close man is to life.

But it shows something else as well. If you really think about it, what do you actually come to? Start thinking correctly about this point right now. You see, if we say to ourselves: The child must therefore take in living food that it can kill and revive itself, and we then say: the human being consists for the most part of fluid – may we then say that the human being consists of water, of the water that we find outside in nature, in inanimate nature? Then this water, which we find in inanimate nature, should be able to work in the child in the same way as it works in the adult, who has already accumulated more vital forces!

From this, however, you can see that the water we carry in us as our almost 90 percent water is not ordinary, lifeless water, but that it is revitalized water. So there is something else that a person carries within them: they carry revitalized water. And this revitalized water is the same water that we have out there in inanimate nature, permeated with what permeates the whole world as life, only asserting itself just as little in inanimate water as human thinking asserts itself in a dead corpse. So when you say: water – here I have water in the stream and water in the human body, you can understand this in the same way as when you say: here I have a corpse and here I have a living person; the water in the stream is the corpse of the water that is in the human body.

That is why we say: Man not only has this dead part in him, this physical part, but he also has a life body, a life body within him. This is what real thinking really gives: man has this life body within him. And how this continues to work in man, we can realize if we really observe man in connection with nature. But then we must actually visualize that we first look out into nature and then look into the human being. When we look out into nature, we find the components, the parts of which the human being consists, only that the human being processes these parts from nature in his own way.

So, to understand this, let us go to the very smallest animals. You will notice, as I talk, how I have already spoken similarly about what is in man in the same way that I now have to speak about the smallest and lowest living creatures out in nature. You see, there are very small animal creatures in the water, in the seawater. These little creatures are actually just little lumps of mucus, usually so small that they can only be seen through a strong magnifying glass. I am now drawing them enlarged (see drawing, left). These little lumps of mucus swim in the surrounding water, in the liquid.

If there were nothing else but a lump of mucus and water all around, the lump of mucus would remain at rest. But if, let's say, some small grain of some substance floats by, for example such a small one (see drawing, right) floats by, then this animal, without anything else being there, spreads its mucus so far that now this grain is inside its mucus. And of course it has to spread this mucus by pulling itself away. This makes the little lump move. So it is because this little creature, this little mucus of life, surrounds a grain with its own mucus that we see it moving at the same time. But the other grain there is now dissolved inside it. It dissolves and the little animal has eaten this grain.

Now, however, such an animal can also eat several such grains. Imagine there is this little animal, there a grain, there also a grain, there and there also a grain (see drawing), then the little animal extends its feelers here, there, and there, and where it has extended them the most, where the grain was largest, it then pulls itself along and pulls the others with it. So this little animal moves in such a way that it feeds at the same time.

Now, gentlemen, when I describe to you how these little lumps of mucus swim around in the sea and feed at the same time, you will remember how I described the so-called white blood cells in humans. They are initially exactly the same in humans. Such small animals also swim around in human blood and feed and move in this way. We come to an understanding of what is actually swimming around in human blood by looking at what is swimming around out there in the sea in the form of such small animals. We therefore carry this within us.

And now that we have remembered how we actually have, in a sense, such creatures swimming around in our blood, creatures that are spread out in nature, living in our blood on all sides, let us try to understand how our nervous system, namely our brain, is constructed. Our brain also consists of the smallest parts. If I draw these smallest parts for you, you will see that they also represent a kind of lumpy, thick mucus. Rays emanate from this mucus (see drawing), which consist of the same substance as the mucus. You see, there is a cell, as it is called, from the brain. It has a neighboring cell. It stretches out its little feet or arms here, and touches the others there. There is a third such cell; it stretches out its little feet here, touches there. They can become very long. Some go almost through half the body. It borders on another cell. When we look at our brain through the microscope, it appears to consist of such dots, where the mucus is more concentrated. And then thick tree branches extend from here; they repeatedly enter into one another. If you would imagine a dense forest with thick treetops that have widely spreading branches that would touch one another, you would have an idea of what the brain looks like under the microscope, under the magnifying glass.

But, gentlemen, you can say now: So he has described these white blood cells that live in the blood. And what is described as the brain is quite similar; lots of little bodies settle there that are in the blood. If I could take all the white blood corpuscles out of a person without killing him, and then put them into the skullcap, after I had first taken out his brain, then I would have made a brain out of his white blood corpuscles.

But the strange thing is that before we could make a brain out of his white blood cells, these white blood cells would have to die halfway. That is the difference between the white blood cells and the brain cells. The white blood cells are full of life. They are always moving around each other in the human blood. I told you that they surge like blood through the veins. That's where they come out. As I explained, they become gourmets and go up to the body's surface. They crawl all over the body.

But if you look at the brain, these cells, these corpuscles, remain in place. They are at rest. They only stretch out their branches and always touch the next one. So the ones that are in the body and are in full motion, they come to rest in the brain and are indeed half dead.

Imagine this little animal crawling around in the sea, eating one time too many. If it eats too much, then the story goes like this: Then it stretches out its arm, its branch, takes this and that, and has eaten too much. It cannot tolerate this; now it splits in two, diverges, and we have two instead of one. It has multiplied. Our white blood cells also have this ability to multiply. Some always die and others are created by multiplication.

In this way, the brain cells that I have drawn for you cannot multiply – our white blood cells within us are fully independent and alive. The brain cells that interlock in this way cannot multiply; two brain cells will never develop from one brain cell. When a person gets a bigger brain, when the brain grows, cells from the rest of the body must always migrate into the brain. The cells must grow into it. It is not that this ever happens in the brain, that the brain cells multiply; they just accumulate. And as we grow, new cells must always migrate in from the rest of the body so that when we are adults, we have a brain that is large enough.

And from the fact that these brain cells cannot reproduce, you can see that they are half dead. They are always dying, these brain cells, always, always dying. If we really look at this properly, we see that human beings have a wonderful contrast: in their blood they carry cells full of vitality in the white blood cells, which want to live forever, and in their brain they carry cells that actually want to die forever, that are always on the path to dying. This is also true: through his brain, man is always on the path to dying; the brain is actually always in danger of dying.

Now, gentlemen, you will have heard, or perhaps experienced yourself – it is always unpleasant when you experience it yourself – that people can also faint. When people faint, they enter into a state as if they were about to fall. They lose consciousness.

What actually happens in a person when they lose consciousness in this way? You will also know that, for example, people who are quite pale, such as girls who are anemic, are most likely to faint. Why? Well, they faint because they have too many white blood cells in relation to the red blood cells. A person must have a very precise ratio, as I have indicated, between white blood cells and red blood cells in order to be consciously aware in the right way. So what does it mean when we become unconscious? For example, when we faint, but also when we sleep, we become unconscious. This means that the activity of the white blood cells is much too active, much too strong. When the white blood corpuscles are too active, when a person has too much life in him, then he loses consciousness. So it is very good that a person has cells in his head that constantly want to die; because if these white blood corpuscles in the brain were still alive, then we would not be able to have any consciousness at all, then we would always be sleeping beings. We would always be sleeping.

And so you may ask: why do plants sleep all the time? — Plants sleep all the time simply because they do not have such living beings, because they actually have no blood at all, because they do not have this life that exists in our inner being as an independent life.

If we want to compare our brain with something in nature outside, we again have to compare our brain only with plants. The brain, which basically continually undermines our own life, and in doing so creates consciousness. So we get a completely contradictory concept for the brain. It is contradictory: the plant does not get consciousness, the human being gets consciousness. This is something that we still have to explain through long deliberation, and we now want to set out to be able to explain it.

We become unconscious every night when we sleep. So something must be going on in our body that we now have to learn to understand. What is going on in our body then? Yes, you see, gentlemen, if everything in our body were the same when we are sleeping as when we are awake, we would not sleep. When we sleep, our brain cells begin to live a little more than they do when we are awake. So they become more similar to the cells that have their own life in us. So you can imagine: When we are awake, these brain cells are very quiet; but when we sleep, these brain cells cannot move very far from their location because they are already localized, because they are held in place from the outside; they cannot move around very well, they cannot swim around very well because they would immediately bump into something else, but they acquire a kind of will to move. The brain becomes restless internally. This is how we enter into an unconscious state, because the brain is inwardly restless.

Now we have to ask: where does this thinking actually come from in us humans? That is, how is it that we can absorb forces from the whole wide universe into ourselves? With our organs of nutrition, we can only absorb earthly forces with the substances. With our respiratory organs, we can only absorb air, namely with oxygen. In order to absorb all the forces from the wide world with our head, it is necessary that it is very quiet inside, that the brain is completely calm. But when we sleep, the brain begins to become active; then we absorb fewer of these forces that are out there in the wide universe, and we become unconscious.

But now the story is like this: Imagine that work is being done in two places; here, let's say, work is being done by five workers, and there by two workers. These are then combined, these works, and each batch continues to do a part of the work. But suppose it becomes necessary to stop work for a bit because too many parts of one kind have been made and not enough of the other. What do we do then? We ask one of the five laborers to go over to the two laborers. Now we have three workers there and four of the five here. We transfer the work from one side to the other if we do not want to increase anything. Man has only a very limited amount of strength. He has to distribute it. So when the brain becomes more active during sleep at night, when it works more, that strength has to be drawn from the rest of the body. This work has to be taken from there. Now, where is it taken from? Yes, you see, it is taken from some of the white blood cells. Some of the white blood cells begin to live less during the night than during the day. The brain lives more. Some of the white blood cells live less. That is the compensation.

But now I have told you: the fact that the brain slows down a bit and becomes calm is how a person begins to think. So when these white blood cells become calm at night, then the person should begin to think wherever the white blood cells become calm. He should begin to think with his body.

Now let us ask ourselves: Does a person perhaps think with his body at night? — That is a ticklish question, isn't it, whether a person perhaps thinks with his body at night! Well, he knows nothing about it. For the time being he can only say that he knows nothing about it. But the fact that I know nothing about something is no proof that it is not there. Otherwise, everything that people have not yet seen would have to be denied. Just because I don't know something, that is no proof that it is not there. The human body could indeed think at night, and one simply knows nothing about it and therefore believes that it does not think.

Now we have to examine whether man perhaps has signs that while he thinks with his head during the day, at night he begins to think with his liver and his stomach and his other organs, and perhaps even with his intestines.

We have certain indications of this. Every person has indications that this is the case. Because just imagine where it comes from, that something is there and yet we know nothing about it. Imagine I am standing there, talking to you, and I am turning my attention to you, that is, I am not seeing what is behind me.

Strange things can happen. For example, I may be accustomed to sitting down here on the chair from time to time while I am talking. Now I turn my attention to you, and during that time someone takes the chair away from me. I didn't see the whole thing, but it happened anyway, and I notice the consequences when I want to sit down now.

You see, the thing is that one must not judge merely according to what one usually knows, but one must judge according to what one might be able to know in a completely indirect way. If I had looked around quickly, I probably wouldn't have settled on the ground. If I had looked around, I would have prevented it.

Now let us take a look at human thinking in the body. You see, natural scientists like to talk about the limits of human knowledge. What do they actually mean by that? When natural scientists talk about the limits of knowledge, they mean that what they have not yet seen – whether through a microscope or a telescope or at all – is not there. But with knowledge, people just keep settling on the ground, because not seeing something is no proof that it is not there. That is the case.

Now, that which I am to become aware of must not only be conceived by me, but I must also observe the conceived. Thinking could be a process that always happens, sometimes in the head, sometimes in the whole body. But when I am awake, I have my eyes open. The eyes not only see outwards, but the eyes also perceive inwards. Likewise, when I taste something, I not only taste what is on the outside, but I also perceive inside, for example, if, let's say, I am sick all over, and what tastes pleasant to someone else becomes disgusting to me. So the inside always determines. The inner perception must also be there.

Now imagine we wake up quite normally. Our brain cells slowly calm down. They come to rest very slowly, and the thing is that I gradually learn to use my senses, that is, I use my senses again. The waking up process follows the cycle of life quite appropriately. That can be the one case.

But the other case can also be that I calm my brain cells too quickly due to some circumstance. I calm them down much too quickly. Now something else happens when I calm them down too quickly. Let's say that if one of the five workers directs the movement, as I said, he takes the fifth one away and puts him over there. If one of them directs it, it may go very smoothly. But suppose one of them has to take it away from one person and put it back with another, then all sorts of trouble can arise, especially if the two of them start arguing about whether it is right or not. If the brain cells in my brain now start to calm down too quickly, then the white blood cells that have now come to rest during sleep will not be able to get moving again so quickly. And it will happen that while I am already calm in my brain, while I have already calmed all my movement in my brain that was there during sleep, the white blood cells down there in the blood will not want to get up yet. They will still want to persist in their calm. They don't want to get up.

It would be truly wonderful if we could perceive these still-lazy blood cells – I am speaking only figuratively, of course – that still want to remain in bed. If we could, they would look at each other just as the quiet brain cells look at each other, and we would perceive the most wonderful thoughts. Just at the moment when we wake up too quickly, we would perceive the most wonderful thoughts. You can easily understand that, gentlemen, if you understand the whole story of the connection between man and nature. If you were to wake up quickly, if nothing else were to prevent it, you would be able to perceive the most wonderful thoughts in your body. But you can't. Why is that not possible? Well, you see, between these lazy, still-sleeping white blood corpuscles, and between that with which we perceive them, which we can only do with our heads, that is where all the breathing is going on. The red blood corpuscles are in there. Breathing is going on, and we have to look at this thought process that is going on in us through the whole breathing process.

Imagine I wake up; this calms my brain. Down there (it is drawn), the white blood cells are somewhere in the blood. I would also perceive them as calm, and I would see the most beautiful thoughts in there. Yes, but now in between there is the whole breathing process. It is just as if I want to look at something and I look at it through cloudy glass; then I see it indistinctly, everything becomes blurred. This breathing process is like cloudy glass. All the thinking that is down there in the body becomes blurred to me. And what arises from it? Dreams. Dreams arise from it: indistinct thoughts that I perceive when the brain activity in my body calms down too quickly.

And again when falling asleep, if I have an irregularity, so if the brain comes into activity too slowly when falling asleep, then the story happens in such a way that I, due to the fact that the brain comes into activity too slowly, still has the ability to perceive something – that I can observe the thinking that already begins down there during sleep, when falling asleep. And so it happens that a person perceives in dreams what actually remains unobserved by him throughout the night, when he is waking up and falling asleep.

We actually only perceive dreams at the moment of waking up. You can very easily visualize the fact that we only perceive dreams at the moment of waking up by taking a good look at a dream. Suppose I am sleeping and there is a chair next to my bed. Now I can dream the following: I am a student and meet another student somewhere, to whom I say some rude word. The other student has to react to it – it's called a 'comment' – and then he has to react to this rude word, and it comes to the point that he challenges me. Sometimes it can be something very trivial, that's how students have to challenge each other.

Now, everything is dreamt: the seconds are chosen, you go out into the forest in a dream, and you have arrived outside; you start shooting. The first one shoots. I still hear the shot in my dream, but I wake up and have just knocked over the chair with my arm next to the bed. That was the shot!

Yes, gentlemen, if I had not pushed the chair over, I would not have had the dream at all, the dream would not have existed! The fact that the dream became precisely such an image only happened at the moment of waking up, because the pushed-over chair was what woke me up in the first place. So in this single moment of waking up, the image arose, what is going on in me became unclear. From this you can see that what is pictorial in the dream is only formed in the single moment in which I wake up, just as what is pictorial in the dream must be formed in the single moment of falling asleep.

But if such images form, and if I can perceive something with such images, then thoughts must be there for it. What do we come to then? We come to understand sleeping and waking a little. So let's ask ourselves: What is it like to sleep? When we sleep, our brain is more active than when we are awake; when we are awake, our brain calms down. Yes, gentlemen, if we could say that our brain becomes more active when we are awake, then, you see, we could be materialists, because then the physical activity of the brain would mean thinking. But if we are reasonable people, we cannot say that the brain is more active when we are awake than when we are sleeping. It must just calm down when we are awake.

So physical activity cannot give us thought. If physical activity gave us thought, that thought would have to consist in stronger physical activity than non-thought. But non-thought consists in stronger physical activity. So you can say: I have lungs; the lungs would be lazy if the external oxygen did not come over them and set them in motion. But my brain becomes lazy during the day; so something external must come for the brain that sets it in motion. And so we have to recognize that in the world — just as oxygen sets the lungs in motion or sets them in action — during the day the brain is brought to thinking by something that is not in the body itself, that does not belong to the body itself.

We must therefore say to ourselves: If we do real science, we are led to assume something incorporeal, something soul-like. We see that it is there. We see it, so to speak, flying in when we wake up, because what is thinking cannot come out of the body. If it came out of the body, one would think better at night. We would have to lie down and fall asleep, and then thinking would arise in our brain. But we don't. So we see, as it were, what our soul and spiritual being flies in.

So that one can say: Science has indeed made great strides in recent times, but it has only come to know that which is not actually suited to life and to thinking, while it has not grasped life itself, and has grasped thinking even less. And so, if you really do natural science, you are led, not by superstition, but precisely by this real natural science, to say: just as there must be oxygen for breathing, so there must be something spiritual for thinking.

More about this next time, because it cannot be decided so easily. There will still be all kinds of counterforces in many of you against what I have said. But it must be said that anyone who does not talk like this simply does not understand the whole story in man. So it is not a matter of spreading superstition, but of creating complete clarity. That is what it is about.

Human life alternates between waking and sleeping. At night, people sink into a state of unconsciousness or subconsciousness. If they want to consciously experience this, they must first be able to suppress the external sensory impressions. To do this, the soul must be artificially emptied of all external impressions. Then, through the will, powerful, strong thoughts must be evoked in the soul. They must flash through the soul. Without a third element, something like an earthquake would be experienced, a shock. Through the will, a state of complete calm, a state of complete stillness, must now be created in the soul. Then the spiritual researcher experiences something similar to what happens at a lower level to a person born blind, who undergoes an operation and gains sight. Color and light flow in. This is what the spiritual researcher experiences. This is the awakening or initiation for him. Now he can judge about what lies behind the sense impressions. These are not dreams of feverish souls. Thus the spiritual eye is opened, the spiritual ear. This is easily judged wrongly, somewhat like a shell when it is first seen in the limestone. It has not grown out of the rock, but has been created by a water shell animal.

What is sleep and dying for the spiritual researcher? He first considers the nature of man, which consists of four limbs. The lowest limb is the physical body. The etheric or life body continuously prevents the body from falling prey to physical and chemical forces as in death. It paralyzes decay; it is a faithful friend between birth and death. No science prevents the assumption of higher limbs of man. Even if positive research were to show that carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen could be combined to form living protein substance, this result could not refute the higher limbs; it would not be a reason to deny the etheric body. In the space that a person fills with his or her being, not only the physical body and the etheric body are present, but also pleasure and pain, perceptions, ideas, instincts, and so on. They also fill this space. And as a fourth link, the ego, that name that cannot be called from the outside, to whom he belongs, who is also the unspeakable name of God: Jehovah-Yahweh.

We feel tired as soon as the astral body withdraws. Who lifts the hand up? The astral body at the behest of the ego. We see with the astral eye through the instrument of the body. Tiredness sets in where we want to apply the astral body, but where the physical body cannot go with us.

The first organ to fail when we fall asleep is the organ of speech. The inner self can no longer move the outer organ of the tongue. Then the senses of sight, taste and smell fail; finally, hearing, the most spiritual sense, is the last to go. The astral body, which governs everything, gradually slips out. As a person falls asleep, he can feel how external impressions cease. Then a total feeling of one's own being sets in. Mistakes, shortcomings and so on, the spiritual world holds the exterior up to him like a mirror. Then a feeling of bliss; then a twitch as a sign of entering into the spiritual world. Then unconsciousness. Then something can be perceived as a fine rain out of the spiritual world into the physical and etheric body. This is the regeneration, the restoration of that which showed itself as fatigue.

There are certain hypotheses that attribute fatigue to so-called fatigue substances. But this is like two people seeing one person slap another. One says, “I saw how he was boiling inside”; the other describes it like this: “I saw how he raised his hand and slapped him.” The legitimacy of external natural science is admitted, but behind everything external there is nevertheless that which directs and guides it.

In order to rebuild our entire soul life, the astral body draws its strength from the spiritual world at night. Again and again it returns to the spiritual world and carries into it from our daytime consciousness that which can enrich us.

Between 1770 and 1815, events took place that left some people indifferent, but which others processed. However, experiences cannot be processed if they are only simply experienced. They must be sunk into the ground, as it were, as seeds, and then grow like plants. The function of sleep must intervene, as it does between learning something by heart and really knowing it. The experiences must be sunk into the ground in sleep and then picked as experiences in waking, otherwise they remain chaotic like erratic blocks as experiences without wisdom. If you sleep too long, too many of the invisible forces are poured in. Such long sleepers become mentally obese. In spiritual and mental terms, this means that one wants to process too much without having anything. This results in dullness and sluggishness of thought.

Dreams arise when the astral body and the I have connected with the etheric body and not yet with the physical body. This is not to be imagined spatially. The second face also arises as a kind of reflection, as a vision, when the physical and etheric bodies do not merge. The etheric and astral bodies work together. The ego loosens and the astral body submerges into its own world. It is an abnormal intermediate state. If the immersion of the astral body into the visual field is imperfect, then deceptive intuitions arise. If the astral body does not submerge, the connection between the astral body and the etheric body is not in order, then visions arise.

Thus there is an unschooled, disorderly connection of the limbs. In the development between birth and death, almost everything relates to the inner soul abilities. Similar to Francesco Redi's sentence “Living things can only come from living things”, the sentence “Spiritual-soul things can only come from spiritual-soul things” can be formulated. Thus the spiritual soul of man between birth and death comes from a spiritual soul that was already working before birth. Before birth, man worked on the still plastic and malleable physical and etheric body, as he did on the soul body between birth and death. At death, the human being takes an extract of the etheric body with them into the spiritual world as malleable material. There, freed from the physical being, they can accomplish what they were unable to do between birth and death. They can incorporate everything into the spiritual archetype of a new physical body, into spiritual material. The fruit of the previous life can be woven into the etheric body and physical body of the new earthly life.

We must want death to happen. We must be grateful to death. It destroys the scaffolding that would only be a hindrance to our ascent. Goethe said:

Nature invented death in order to have much life.

The spiritual essence has invented death to make a perfection of human life possible. A great poet said:

Man is initially a shadow of a dream.

He has only the shadow of the dream, only the dream of the shadow. That is man of the outer sense world. But if he has a ray of knowledge and light, it becomes as bright as day for him, and joy radiates through all life.

Ladies and Gentlemen! The subject of today's lecture must interest every human being. Not only is it interesting to ask what happens to a person after they have crossed the threshold of death, but they also have a profound moral obligation to know something about the essence of the human being. Man feels what can be called the urge for perfection in the noblest sense. This striving can never be completed. With this realization, the endeavor arises to know something about how man can succeed, what the possibility is to satisfy the striving for perfection. This raises the question of death and immortality.

Our time with its habits of thought is not favorable [for such questions]. Therefore, a new school of thought, spiritual science, is trying to approach this question. It has to be so alien to today's life that it seems strange. Therefore, some people who are here tonight will not be immediately convinced. Those who have never heard of it before will perhaps only shake their heads, be ironic, or perhaps even just scoff. I realize that I will face all kinds of resistance. I will only give one example of logical thinking, which is entirely in line with genuine scientific thinking. If one wants to penetrate to the essence of the human heart, one must be made aware of the saying of a philosopher, to the effect that the immortality of the soul, if it exists, cannot begin only with death, but must already be linked to ordinary life.

How do you come to the realization of a thing, being and the like? This is what science asks. Combining hydrogen and oxygen to form water is quite different from considering each of these two substances on its own (for example, separating the oxygen and examining it on its own).

Just as we have our soul in our daily lives, it lives in the body like oxygen in water. The soul perceives through the ear, the eye and so on. All expressions of the soul are only possible because the soul is connected to the organs – like hydrogen with oxygen in water. If there is no way to separate the soul, then one would despair of not being able to recognize the basic nature of the soul.

Is there a state in life where the spiritual-soul life separates from the physical being? It can be said that something different occurs during sleep; the bodily functions take place differently [than in the waking state]. Is it not much more likely that the soul separates and leaves the body alone? Can the content of our soul, our emotional experience – joy and suffering – be logically explained, can this soul-being have an existence separate from the body?

There is a logical thinking that cannot escape this. Let us assume that a person would indeed undergo a change in such a way that only the body is still active; all soul, on the other hand, is extinguished. When the lung activity is maintained, we cannot recognize the nature of oxygen, [that is] of what enters the lungs, but the lung life activity remains in itself - it is something other than the oxygen itself.

Thus we must seek to recognize the nature of the soul as something different from the organization of our body. The independence of oxygen from the lungs is therefore the independence of the soul from the life activity of the lungs.

In the moment when the soul leaves the body during sleep, consciousness becomes deeper and deeper, and the independent life of the soul thus begins.

Today we want to take a closer look at dream life. A boy with a talent for drawing was given a particularly difficult drawing task that he was unable to complete in time for the school exam. He therefore had a fear. Nevertheless, even though he had not completed the task, his grade was not worse for it.

Periodically, a dream now returns as a state of fear in this person's life, but much stronger than before, so that he often wakes up trembling from it. Then days go by without him dreaming like that. However, it becomes apparent that his drawing ability is improving. At the end of such an intermediate period, the fearful dream always returns. Before this greater ability flowed into the hand, it roamed in the subconscious; the states of fear appeared in dreams. And when the increased abilities showed themselves, when they were there, then the dream stopped. These abilities first work in the organism – in materialistic terms, on the nerves, the organs. Before they enter consciousness, the soul prepares the physical organization, it works on the organs.

Here we approach the soul; we catch the soul at work in the organization of the body. The soul works on the organization from conception to death – or, to put it more precisely, [still] somewhat differently. We can remember back to a certain point in our lives. In the years before our memory, the soul works in a completely different way on our organization – without our consciousness. Even before we become conscious, the soul must have been there, and consequently before it was active in the body. Down in the organism, these forces are at work preparing the organization, just as in the example mentioned earlier, the drawing skills, the soul work, presented itself in dreams. In this area, materialistic views are absolutely insufficient.

That a human being gets false teeth happens in any case; that a person can speak is not so obvious. Without other people, he will never learn to speak. So the ability to speak cannot just be due to the speech organs, but the life and weaving of language within us works out this ability.

Since the human being is a coherent being, it must be assumed that there is something spiritual about him from the very beginning, even before the physical work.

[Here is another comparison:] How can one assume that a person who has had trouble all day will be in a different frame of mind in the evening? This is how the spiritual always works. The state of mind can be compared quite well with what the person has experienced before. [So one must assume:] Not from supersensible worlds, but only from living with people can the state of mind arise with which the person enters life through birth. Such trains of thought are entirely in line with the way of thinking of today's natural science. So the idea of repeated earth lives is something that arises by itself.

Only two hundred years ago it was assumed that animals, worms for example, could develop out of inanimate mud. But Francesco Redi formulated the now irrefutable sentence: “Living things can only come from living things.” It was only with great difficulty that he was able to escape the fate of Giordano Bruno because of this sentence. However, the sentence “Spiritual-mental can only arise from spiritual-mental” will initially be ridiculed and mocked, but then gradually accepted and finally taken for granted in the future.

What happens in this life affects later lives; these are only logical conclusions - but experiments [in this field] are also important and possible. Ludwig Deinhard has written a book about this.

But everyone can only use their own soul as a tool to investigate the soul. Not everyone can become a spiritual researcher, but just as anyone can educate themselves about astronomy, chemistry and so on, the same is true here, as will be briefly explained. People make themselves a tool for exploring the spiritual world.

[Let us take another example:] Nostradamus. - In the book by Kemmerich about prophecies there is a whole chapter about Nostradamus. Nostradamus was a doctor, he was a doctor by nature and did an infinite amount of good, especially during the plague in Provence. But] it was said that he was a Calvinist, which undermined his reputation. The powers that he otherwise gave to humanity with all his soul were transformed into prophetic gifts – visionary gifts, like the power of thought into warmth, warmth into movement and so on. The visionary gifts could only take place under certain conditions. Nostradamus created a laboratory for himself, that is, a room with a glass roof where he stayed at night. When the soul had become completely calm, the stars were then observed, and this triggered sayings that Nostradamus recorded. All worries and concerns ceased. This state of mind was inherited from his fathers. The modern-day seer must artificially create this state of mind. He has to bring special impulses to the forefront of the soul. Symbols are best for this, those that stimulate our soul, shake us up inwardly. The forces slumber beneath – these slumbering forces are awakened by this. Then the person is as if asleep, but not unconscious. We then no longer perceive anything through the [sense] organs. We have the soul as we have oxygen when it is separated from water. We then say to ourselves: You are experiencing another world. At first the experience is such that one cannot put what one has experienced into words. However, spiritual science could never be taught if it remained that way. The spiritual researcher must go further and further, especially when he has experienced something that he cannot express. One knows: one experiences something, but one cannot think it. If one continues the exercise, one also learns to speak about it. One experiences what one experienced as a child when learning language. We learn to use our brain. We can only experience this in pain, so to speak.

If one has triumphed over one's organism, then one has also explored it experimentally.

Once our culture has been permeated by spiritual science, it will be possible to approach the education of young people quite differently. People can then have different, inner soul experiences than in today's spiritual culture.

In the second half of life, when the soul no longer has a constructive effect on the bodily organization, these soul-spiritual forces, which one acquires through schooling in life, accumulate and have reached their greatest tension at the moment of death. The energies to work in the [physical] organization again must be sought in the soul-spiritual life.

These spiritual-mental powers that build the body are beyond decay and becoming. These powers arise precisely because of death. This realization gives us courage and strength.

Today I would like to say a few words about the development of the future. We must be clear about earthly human development because it is necessary for the apocalypse, because doubts are very easily possible.

If one can come to look back by means of certain methods that one must apply, it can still be doubtful to look into the future.

But being prophetic is less doubtful now because everything in nature has laws, but only those who see through the laws can say something.

Whoever knows the laws of chemistry knows exactly how to mix the substances, so the one who recognizes the spiritual laws can draw the right conclusions.

So we use methods to see into the future. I would like to explain in detail what the stages of the past are and what the circumstances are under which one can see and see clearly. There are levels of clairvoyance. The development before our earthly state was the astral, before that the rupa and before that the arupa. The earthly state is perceived through the physical senses. Everyone can see that. The preceding as well as the future state cannot be seen with physical senses, but it is still possible to perceive them. In addition to his waking state, a person also has two sleeping states: dreamless and dream.

Those who have not undergone any development will only have confused dreams, but those who are trained can bring regularity into their dream life.

The dreams of the purely materialistic person will only deal with material things. But for those who live by the principle of Goethe's saying, “Transience is only a parable,” dreams become symbols.

Of course, this is not yet clairvoyance; a clairvoyant is someone who, during their waking day consciousness, can continually leap into the astral vision; they must be awake and look into the astral world. The clairvoyant sees the aura of the person. The aura surrounds the person like a cloud. In undeveloped people, this cloud is confused; the clearer the thoughts, the more ordered and structured the aura.

How does one develop the sense organs for seeing?

These sense organs are located at different points in the aura. One sees an elongated structure from the brain to the chest, embedded in this body structure are the “sacred wheels”, called “lotuses”. There are actually six lotuses in this body. These are the astral sense organs. Between the two eyebrows is the two-leaved lotus flower, which turns from right to left. The one who is now able to see, the lotus flower begins to turn in him.

A second lotus flower is located in the larynx, it is the sixteen-petalled one, turning from right to left. In the past, the dream-like person was gifted with it, he did not contribute to it, it was given to him by nature. It was lost again during the development of the mind. Eight petals were fully developed in bright, shiny colors, but later this flower darkened because the person matured into bright consciousness.

We can now take a look at the secrets of the initiate and understand when Buddha speaks of the eight-limbed path in his teaching.

There are eight virtues that the secret disciple must acquire:

1. Faith and understanding of karma
II. Clear thinking
III. Clear speech
IV. Right action
V. Right livelihood
VI. Fulfilling one's duties
VII. Memory control
VIII. Concentration of thought.

Whoever moves on this path, the other eight leaves begin to move, the first eight are pulled along. So the sixteen leaves turn from right to left. Buddha did not speak of the eightfold path in vain.

A third organ is near the heart, it is the twelve-petalled lotus flower. To develop these senses, other methods are needed. Every theosophist knows of six virtues that need to be developed.

I. Tolerance
II. Serenity, patience
III. Belief, trust
IV. Love of freedom
V. Control of thoughts, control of actions
VI. Concentration of thought.

Six of these twelve have been developed in humans before. Here, too, the next six will begin to rotate, and then move the first six along with them. This is how one acquires the ability of astral vision. Through diligent meditation one attains these virtues, through these virtues one attains astral vision. Meditation is healthy, it leads to moral health. Then, a little lower, is the ten-petalled lotus flower, a little lower still the six-petalled lotus flower and then, lower still, the four-petalled lotus flower.

Those who have developed the astral sense of the sixteen-petalled lotus flower can see into the thoughts of other people. Those who have developed the sense of the twelve-petalled flower can see into the sensory world of others, but those who have developed the sense of the two-petalled flower, the upper one between the eyes, can see into the karma of others. I can only discuss the development of this sense in very intimate circles.

The ability of a person to perceive the two globes before and after the earthly - physical - occurs when he is able to perceive something in deep sleep, dreamless. He then experiences what is going on in the mental world or in Devachan and can look at it here. But not only in sleep, but in clairvoyance he can perceive the two higher globes.

It is important to put all your energy into the first two sentences of “Light on the Path”, but not just in thought; they must be felt. And in the same way, the other two sentences

Before the masters the voice can speak,
it must unlearn the woundings.
Before them the soul can stand,
its heart's blood must water the feet.

Once the light has been absorbed, the senses are awakened in order to be able to see the higher spheres. “Light on the Path” is written in such a high symbolic language and dictated by a higher being.

But there are other methods, which will be discussed another time.

The manas is awakened precisely through diligent meditation.

He who can see the higher state is an adept. Only the adept is capable of this.

Let us place ourselves in the development of our earth. Our earth is becoming thinner and thinner, finer and finer, ultimately only astral and then only spiritual. In the future, all people will perceive it. So the earth goes through seven times seven states.

Let us consider what is happening today. Man can only perceive in a mineral way, he cannot perceive the life of an animal or a plant directly; it must first be made known to him through the senses. Man cannot prepare a plant germ, but he can make machines because he is attuned to the inanimate; it is the lowest form of his spirit.

Once upon a time there were no machines, but later on there will be a perfect processing of the inanimate stone, of the crystal - the stone also has a dull consciousness. At the end of the second round, man had transformed all the soil, and then he worked his mind into the physical world. He imposes his laws on the mineral, the inanimate, by reworking the mineral world. He has then worked his mind into it. The earth is then a product of the human mind.

The clairvoyant can experience beforehand what all people are going through today. He can develop the lotus flowers as an astral sense organ in himself earlier than the average person has them; when the beings are in the astral state, they will also have them. The lotus flower plays in beautiful colors, regularly.

So man achieves the transformation of natural products into artificial products with his mind. The astral world is an imprint of the minds of people. The movements of the flowers then match what he has worked into them.

What was previously worked in the inanimate is now being brought to life by the turning lotus flower. He transforms the earth into a living astral being.

Thus, on the later globe, the spirit will move the bodies. [Form states]

Just as today the word emerges from the human larynx, so then he himself will be the word. He is a spiritual being that vibrates himself, that sonorously sounds his manasic self. Now that he has become spiritual, he animates everything around him, he then fills the globe with his being; he will permeate with his own consciousness what he has done with his lotus flower. After us, plant life will be the lowest realm, it will then disappear, and the animal kingdom is the lowest; then the animal kingdom will also disappear, then the whole earth will be a creation that man himself has prepared for himself. Then comes a pralaya. Then comes the next cycle of the earth - round -, everything is repeated again. Then in the fifth round the earth is so developed that it has the state as physical, which will be the next of our present round - round four, similar to the astral plant nature. Man will then be on an earth whose lowest kingdom is plant; so our next metamorphosis will be denser – that which will become our next state will be denser. The lotus flower will then truly bloom. Man is today at the stage of his mineral development. In the fifth round, he will be in his plant development; what is now “mechanized” will then be “organized”.

When he has worked through the physical earth, he will animate it himself. What he has done by technical means, he will find; there are forms - entelechies - that he makes today, which he will then animate.

These are the higher stages of human development. It is not foolishness when we speak of the future. Initiates can put themselves into certain states of consciousness in order to see what are now ideals of the mind.

The elevated human being rises to the level of prophecy, which is why the term “prophet” is used in Jewish secret language when the divinely endowed receive the impulse to see the future.

My dear children! Today, now that we are at the end of our first school year here in our dear Waldorf School, let us inscribe on our souls something of why we are actually in this school. What does it mean that our dear friend Herr Molt, together with Frau Molt, founded this Waldorf School for you, my dear children, and for humankind? What does it mean that you come here every morning in order to learn something good? What does it mean, above all, that there are people who are taking great pains to guide you into life so that you will grow up to be good and capable people?

You know, my dear children, that I have often come here during this school year, and in each class I always asked you a question, a question that comes straight from my heart. I often asked you, “Do you love your teachers?” [“Yes!” shout the children.] And you know, you always answered me as warmly as you just did today.

Now there will be weeks in which you do not see your teachers for a while, and so now I want to say something different to you. I hope your hearts will often answer this question during vacation. Now I would like to say to you, “Now that you are not going to see your teachers, learn to be grateful to them.” In the same way that you have learned, tried hard to learn to love your teachers, now learn to feel firmly in your heart that you are grateful to your teachers, so that when you ask yourselves, “Am I grateful to my teachers?” you can honestly and heartily say, “Yes, I am grateful.”

Now there is something else I want to say to you. You see, my dear children, here with us it should not happen that as Waldorf School students you say, “Hey, school is over now; it’s vacation. When we'e in school, we have to work hard and learn, but now we can be lazy. We don't have to do anything. We'e glad that we can be lazy.” You know that is not what we want to say. We should say something else; we should say, “Yes, it's a beautiful day. During the day we experience many beautiful things along with some that are sad and painful, but what would human beings be if they could not experience through their senses everything that divine spirituality has put into the world, everything that is so great and beautiful and true.”

But unless we can also sleep and rest, we cannot use our ears and eyes properly to hear and see all the beautiful things divine spirituality has put into the world. Think about how after enjoying the day, you have to rest at night, and then in the morning you are strengthened again. Your eyes see better and your ears hear better. If you had to stay awake all the time, you would surely not be able to enjoy and learn about life in all its truth and beauty the way divine spirituality made it.

This is also how it is in life as a whole. You should not think, “Now that it’s vacation we can be lazy;” you should think, “All of what we received from our dear teachers, everything that humankind has learned so that individuals can know it—we received all this, and now we need a little rest, so that when we have rested, we can go back into our classes and be fresher and more lively. In fact, we will each go into the next grade; with new forces we will once again take into our hearts what our teachers will give us through their love and hard work, what humanity has learned in service to humanity.” This is how we should think of it—that we are resting during the vacation to get strong again for the whole new school year.

Then, my dear children, I would like to tell you a little about what it means that this Waldorf School of ours exists, and what it means that we are here in this school. You see, the person you are going to grow up to be, this person has a physical body, a soul and a spirit. You each have a body, a soul, and a spirit. And when a person is very little and is born into the world, this body and soul and spirit are all very incomplete. In you, they are still incomplete, but they are supposed to become more complete. Here in the Waldorf School your body will be shaped to become skilled at everything a person has to do in life. Your teachers have worked hard at this on your behalf; you have been introduced to eurythmy, for example, which works to make your body very skillful in life, and many other things have been brought to you so that you will become people who are skillful and capable and strong in their bodies. When you are small, you are fairly clumsy. You have to become more skillful. It is the same with the soul which is in each one of you. But it has to be developed so that it can send out threads in all directions for life. This is like unwinding the strands from a tangled ball of yarn—the threads for your life have to be untangled from your soul. This is how the soul develops, and this happens for you so that you become good and capable with regard to your forces for life. Good strong forces for life have to be fetched up out of your souls. And your spirit—yes, my dear children, if we did not educate the spirit, we would not be human beings at all. The spirit must be educated so that we become very good and capable human beings.

Now you see, when a person has worked all day or when a child has played and learned well and then sleeps, sometimes dreams come to them from their sleep. Most of you have experienced dreams. Sometimes they are very beautiful dreams, sometimes ugly dreams. And now you are going to go rest during vacation. Then something will come to you that can be compared to a dream. You see, during vacation, when you think back to when you were in school, it may be that you think, “Oh, I had nice teachers, I learned a lot, I was glad to be able to go to school.” And when you think that, those are beautiful dreams during your vacation. And when you think, “Oh, I should have been less lazy; I didn' like to go to school,” and so forth, then you are having bad dreams during vacation. Think back often during this vacation to when you were in school; for example, think like this: “My thoughts are drawn back to the Waldorf School, where my body is shaped for skillful activity, where my soul is developed to be strong in life, where my spirit develops so that I can be truly human.” When you think often like this about how your body is being shaped, your soul developed and your spirit educated, you will send yourself a good dream for your time of rest, and then your vacation time will also contribute something to making you a good and capable person in life.

You know, when I came in today, one of your good little fellow students gave me something. Let’s see what it is. Look, this is what he gave me—a washcloth and a flower! Now I guess I must wash myself and dry my hands, and perhaps the flower is meant to say that your lessons are something that blooms as beautifully as this nice little white flower. [Rudolf Steiner holds up the washcloth.] And perhaps this could remind us that what we learn here is also something we can use to wash away everything in our souls that is incomplete, all bad thoughts and feelings that want to make us be lazy and not pay attention. I would like to give you each a little spiritual cloth so you can wash away all the laziness and lack of hard work and inattentiveness, and so on. So I am very glad that you have given me this little symbol and that I can show you how to use it to wash away a whole lot of what should not be in your souls.

And look at this little flower! You have learned many things here that you needed to learn, and what you learned is so many little flowers like this in your soul. Think about this when you remind yourselves that your thoughts are hurrying back to the Waldorf School where your bodies are trained to be skillful, your soul is developed to be strong for life, and your spirit unfolds so that you can be properly human—and think about how flowers like this are being cultivated in your soul day after day, and how grateful you should be for that. Everything in life can be of service to us and help us think about what is right. That, dear children, is what I wanted to say to you.

Think about each other, too! You have gotten to know each other and also, I hope, learned to love each other. Think about each other very, very often, and think about how good it was that you came together so that your teachers could help you grow into good and capable people. Don't think, “Now we can be lazy,” but think, “We need to rest, and when we have rested we will come back and be fresh and ready to receive what our dear teachers bring to us.”

And now, although you will not yet be able to understand it, I would like to say a few words in your presence to your dear teachers, who have now put all the diligent work of the Waldorf School behind them, and I would like to shake their hands. First of all, I would like to shake hands with Herr Molt and Frau Molt for having created this Waldorf School for us so that we can try to do something for humanity in its dire straits. My dear friends—as I said, I am speaking to the teachers, but you children can also hear it and can remember it later—the years behind us have been bitter ones for humanity, years in which people beat and bloodied and shot each other. There are still other bitter things in front of us, for the times still look very bad. But then the Waldorf teachers were the first to find the courage to appear here and to start to believe something that I am convinced that people today must start to believe above all else. The Waldorf teachers came here and said, “Yes, we have to work on the children so that when we are old, something will have happened to the children that can prevent unhappiness and bitterness of this sort from overcoming people.” This requires a certain courage and it requires hard work, but above all it requires something that awakens in human hearts the possibility of not sleeping, but of staying awake. That, dear Waldorf teachers, is why I want to shake your hands so warmly. If many people would wake up and look at the decision you have come to instead of sleeping through it, if what happens here would find successors, then you would realize that you were the first to work at something that is so very necessary for our future as human beings.

Dear children, when your teachers came into school each morning, they were people who clearly grasped the task of our times and devoted themselves diligently to what was required of them. And it was always a warm moment for me when I asked you, “Do you love your teachers?” and you so heartily answered, “Yes!” During the vacation I will also wonder whether you are grateful to your teachers. But you, dear Waldorf teachers, let me warmly shake your hands. I thank you in the name of the spirit of humanity which we are trying to cultivate throughout our spiritual movement. In this spirit, I shake your hands for everything you have accomplished on behalf of the future ideals of humanity. Today is the day for us to be able to remember these things, and it is the day when you children should feel how grateful you ought to be to these teachers of yours.

There is still something I would like to say today. Alongside everything we have learned here, which the individual teachers have demonstrated so beautifully, there is something else present, something that I would like to call the spirit of the Waldorf School. It is meant to lead us to true piety again. Basically, it is the spirit of Christianity that wafts through all our rooms, that comes from every teacher and goes out to every child, even when it seems that something very far from religion is being taught, such as arithmetic, for example. Here it is always the spirit of Christ that comes from the teacher and is to enter the hearts of the children—this spirit that is imbued with love, real human love. This is why I want you children to feel that not only have you learned something here, you have also gradually learned to feel what it is for one person to love another. And so now as you are going on vacation, I would like you to think of all your schoolmates with a warm-hearted “Until we meet again! Until we meet again, when we come back strengthened into these rooms, when we can once again work with our teachers on what will make us into good and capable people.”

You see, dear children, you must consider how life here in this school is connected to the whole of human life. When people get old, they are seventy or eighty years old. Life brings joy and sorrow, beauty and ugliness. When we get old, we are seventy or eighty, as I said. We can compare our life to a day with twenty-four hours. If this day represents our life, then a year that we spend in this day of life would be about twenty minutes long, and your eight years in primary school would be something like two to three hours out of your whole life. So the time that you spend in the Waldorf School makes up two or three hours out of your whole life. And when we go through the other twenty hours we have for living, for working, for becoming aware of the spirit, for doing things with other people so that something good can happen in the world—when we go through these hours, it can be a real comfort for our hearts, a real strength for our lives, if we are able to realize that the two or three hours of life we spent in primary school gave us something for our whole life, gave us strength and spirit and the ability to work.

Let us say this to ourselves, my dear children, now on this last day of our first school year in the Waldorf School, but during the vacation, let us remember something else again and again. I would like to write it in your souls so that it blooms there like this cute little flower, so that you think of it often: “Let my thoughts hurry back to my dear Waldorf School, where my body is trained to work and to do good, where my soul is developed to be strong for life, where my spirit is awakened to be truly good and human.” We want you all to become such good and capable people someday, when you are grown up and out there in life.

I wanted to speak to you from heart to heart today. I wanted to say this to you out of love, and I say it to you so that you can take note of it. Once again, think of your thoughts hurrying back to your dear Waldorf School, where your body is shaped to work capably in life, where your soul is developed for strength in life, where your spirit is awakened to true humanity. That is how it should be. And so now we will leave each other, and when we come back, we will go on as we have done before.

Afterwards you will receive your reports.¹ Whoever gets a good report should not take it as an indication that it is now all right to be lazy, and whoever gets a bad report need not immediately start to cry, but should think about trying harder next year.

Out of the spirit of the Waldorf School, shake your teachers’ hands and say to each other, “We will be back in fall to learn to do good work, to develop our souls to be strong for life, and to awaken our spirit to true humanity.”

And so, until we meet again!

• 1. At the end of the school year, instead of receiving grades, the children received brief characterizations of their behavior and of how they worked.